I am an experimental artist whose scattered mind leaves me frequently moving between mediums. With projects generally involving digital media in some way, I combine performance and installations, projections and animations, or simply boredom and impatience. My work has a tendency to be rooted in myself and my own experiences, so I feel well situated in a largely egotistical digital age. It is often not vanity but insecurity that drives the present generation to focus on themselves, and this resonates with me. I escape reality in my work but am frequently confronted with my own insecurities - especially my Peter Pan-ish fear of growing up. Having spent years working in theatre, particularly theatre for young audiences, I have found that an intense focus on the creation process creates the most exciting results. As an unofficial spokesperson for potato chips, I hope that this artist talk will leave you hungry.

I explore how space, the ways we create and recycle it connects with time. Space as social geography and the physical/nonphysical structures we create often collide with aspects of Physics in my work. The dialogue and tensions between these ways of knowing and doing are interesting points for me. My art often becomes about ‘us’ and not just ‘me.’ It’s asks who are we, where we are going, and what is the long game? Often stories from my grandparents weave into my narratives.

I am a process-oriented artist with the physical act of making and doing being important. Printmaking is my Zen place. It’s liberating to break and reassemble materials to make new surfaces for plates, print on nontraditional surfaces and shapes, incorporate found objects and bring multimedia approaches into the process. I use my own digital images as source materials. My work has been shown both nationally and internationally.

My practice is motivated by encounters with movement in natural spaces. I primarily work with drawing and printmaking, mediums that allow my process to be intuitive and take shape as a form of note-taking. This is reflected in my subject matter through meandering lines and repetitive marks which mimic rhythms of steps. The ephemeral imagery I work with motivates me to explore the relationship between memory and place through non-linear, fragmented, visual narratives of nature.

Emily Conlon is a multidisciplinary artist and holds a BFA Honours in Visual Arts from the University of Windsor. She is currently on the Board of Directors for Saskatchewan Printmakers and has participated in print exchanges and exhibitions within Canada and internationally.

My art practice is rooted in the exploration of the natural world and memory. My work is intensely personal, yet it is grounded in communal ways of being and seeing–collective memory, culture and belonging to place.

Within exterior landscapes, I am interested in ecologically restorative works that seek to support and repair environments in transition, often damaged watersheds or damaged ecosystems (communities of organisms living together in combination with their physical environment).

For interior spaces, I create sculpture and installations that invite contemplation and awareness of our interconnectedness to the more-than-human world. Using materials such as textiles, glass, paper, natural materials and found objects, I create sculptures called “dwells”, that serve as reliquaries of remembering and meditation.

My physical practice of creating work, such as building, cutting, rubbing, printing, sculpting, casting and sewing, is meditative and healing for me.

My artistic practice reflects on and engages with lived-experiences, vicarious encounters, intimate moments and memory. I am often working with image fragments, extracting and concealing through my process of making to reveal intangible thoughts through tangible means. Engaging with both text and image, I utilize mediums that best support the meaning or the message behind the work, dabbling in sculpture, collage, printmaking, drawing and in-the-moment inspired mediums or objects. Using visual poetry and emotional familiarity, I weave narratives of compiled moments and reflect on themes of absence and the passing of time.

Chelsea Brant (she/her) is a Mohawk/German multidisciplinary emerging artist and curator, with a BA honours degree in studio arts from the University of Guelph. Brant has exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally and has curated and co-curated exhibitions within Ontario. She is primarily an oil painter and text-based artist.