I am an Indian-born Canadian interdisciplinary artist and a Master of Fine Arts graduate student at the University of Saskatchewan. My work tells stories about life, relationships, belonging, and my connection to land, culture, and people. Drawing upon the wisdom of the land where I was born and the ancestral land I now call home. My primary research interests include understanding a community, belonging to a cultural landscape, and migratory experiences—human or material journeys—presence and absence. I honed these interests through various media, including sculpture, photography, printmaking, drawing, video, sound, writing, and ethnographic research methods. Through my work, I investigate how social relationships and cultural values shape the sense of place, contributing to community integration and collective well-being. 

Veronika Chermenskaya is a young Russian-Jewish artist, who recently relocated from Israel for her MFA in Studio Art. She merges traditional drawing with animation using a variety of digital software to immerse the viewer in mental states that provoke transcendental experiences. Anchored in memory, Veronika’s work allows her to journey through time, place, space, and states of mind. She depicts specific places where each remembered detail acts as a type of object mnemonic. 

Shona Dietz is a prairie based multi-media artist whose work has a strong connection to ritual and the everyday, involving memory and the aging process. Her practice is rooted in materiality and allegory; the history and associations of her materials become the content of both her installations and performance work. The alternate realities that she creates question our own perceptions of what or whose reality we actually live in.

Currently Dietz is examining how attitudes and behaviors can be altered by the experiential and perceptual shifts that occur if we are fortunate enough to age. These shifts rework the thought processes, creating random feelings of joy and comfort or fear and anger. Unexpected changes upset the status quo and greatly affect an individual and their communities, that is to say, all human connections - without bias. It’s a human thing…or perhaps it’s an animal thing?