Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman

Working between Ottawa and Montreal, Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman is an emerging Somali-Indian artist whose practice addresses her cultural history and heritage through the re-working of family photo albums. Funeral is a mixed-media collage depicting her family shortly after her grandmother’s passing. This work combines vibrant colors and complex facial expressions to reflect the pain shared by family members who have come together to support each other during an emotionally challenging period. In her painted and collaged works, she explores concepts of migration, familial history, and discrimination, while also offering visibility and representation to Black figuration within the broader dialogue of Canadian painting.

Abdourahman  “Funeral” 

Oil acrylic and collage on unstretched canvas, 60’’x60’’ 2017

Sarah Jasmine Hodgson

Sarah Hodgson uses new technologies to examine what makes us human and why we collect objects. For Digital Afterlife_b.1922_Opened File, Sarah asked her grandmother to select sentimental objects that marked significant points in her life, such as the passing down of family heirlooms, marriage, and gifts from loved ones. Each of these items was put through a 3D photogrammetry processing system which created 3D replica models of the real objects that doubled as extensions of her grandmother's life within a digital age format. She then fragmented these 3D models and collaged them into abstract dilapidated forms that evoke the alteration of human memory, forever subject to shifting change. This project acts as a time capsule that memorializes and celebrates her grandmother's life by digitally connecting previous generations with newer ones.

Digital Afterlife_b.1922_Opened File 

Plexiglass and epson print,  each variable sizes, 2019

Alexia-Leana Kokozaki

Alexia Kokozaki is a Canadian-Cypriot multidisciplinary artist whose work is characterized by themes of human intentionality, storytelling, and sentimentality. here are some flowers to remember me by explores the relationship between two people who have never met: the artist’s late grandfather and herself. Alexia’s documented artistic intervention was inspired by an inexplicable feeling of sensing her grandfather’s presence at random times in her life, especially in locations where he used to work in Cyprus. The video depicts a correspondence between remnants of her grandfather (his old workplaces) and remnants of herself (hand-sewn flowers) where there is a motion for a hopeful, perhaps naive connection, between two people who did not have the opportunity to meet during their lifetimes.

remember-me-nots

Hand sewn flowers and mesh

bag, 12" x 11" x 2", 2019 - ongoing

Debbie Ratcliffe

“We want a new vision. We want to amp it up. Colours of the world. Hear our roar. We are the queens and kings of colour. Come and see us. We love art. We’ve got a disability, but what of it? We are sisters here in the spiritual way. To have a career in art means to meet people, have a studio and art shows. Our destiny is our work, and to go out in public making speeches. We’re part of a puzzle that got slipped into place. Here we are not a club, we are individuals with a passion for art. We demand that what we paint is real and true no matter who creates it. We are bold in the creation. We do love our work. We were put on this earth for a purpose. We are putting our own mark on the world. I am an artist.”

Debbie Ratcliffe is an artist working and creating with BEING studio, an artistic hub that supports and offers a community to creatives with developmental disabilities.

Butterfly Bounce

Acrylic on canvas, 20x24, 2012

A Night to Remember  

Acrylic on canvas, 16” x 20”,  2012 

Marika Smart

“Your life is so good. Flowers, homes, animals, life, spring, air, water, earth colours, hopes, sunlight, moon, dreams, stories. I am proud to see the sky and the sun, to have a home and food, to have life. The colours are inside me. We see the light of the rainbow, colours at night, the sky talking to us. We come to life. We have art and paint our life. We have family, friends, work and love.”

Marika Smart is an artist working and creating with BEING studio, an artistic hub that supports and offers a community to creatives with developmental disabilities.

By Seaway 

Acrylic on canvas, 18” x14”, year unknown

Willem Deisinger

Willem Deisinger is an artist and designer whose sculptural work focuses on human interaction, communication, and the speculation of ecological utopia. A Tool to Touch With is a project that explores an imagined friendship between an AI named Zane and a gardener. The project showcases a sculptural tool built in collaboration between Zane and the gardener, as well as a journal written by the gardener that recounts their interactions. Through this relationship, the project reflects upon the human as a teacher of slowness in the face of mechanized hyper-productivity. The relationship between Zane and the gardener raises questions of epistemology, mind-body relations, current economic ideals and collaboration with the non-human in contrast to values of care, slowness, and connection to the broader ecosystem of the world.

A Tool to Touch With.  

carved birch, plastic, rope, with epson inkjet prints 2021. 9’’  diameter and 17x22 prints

Olivia Johnston

Olivia Johnston is a lens-based artist living and working in Ottawa who uses a variety of photographic strategies as a means to explore questions about the photographic image and art history. Saints and Madonnas is a body of work that touches on ideas of Christianity, Christian iconography, and ancestral history within the context of portraiture. The figures in this series are elevated to a biblical status by being enclosed in gilded frames, crowned with a thin halo, and surrounded by religious trinkets. Each portrait features a member of the Ottawa community that is socially connected to Olivia in one way or another, who sought to find the divine and the holy within every person.

Our Lady of Sorrows (Sothea)  

2019 pigment ink printed on  cotton rag paper, hand-applied  imitation gold lead, porcelain  objects (objects not for sale)  19.75x26.5x1’’ 

St. John the Evangelist (Fin)  

2019 pigment ink print on cotton  rag paper. 36 in x 36 in 

Framed size: 38 in x 38 in

St. Jerome (Nader), 2019 

36 in x 36 in 

Framed size: 38 in x 38 in ed.  1/3

Don Kwan

Don Kwan is a queer, third-generation Chinese-Canadian artist from Ottawa whose work explores place, identity, representation, and family memory across time. In Veneration for Grandparents, Kwan uses a combination of Chinese joss money, vellum, silkscreen, wire and thread in a series of masks that address his own emotional response to the pandemic. Joss money is used for burning offerings during funerals or events related to Chinese ancestral worship. In this work, the joint masks made of this material are meant to commemorate his grandparents and to also communicate to them the state of the world we are living in. The intertwining of the masks acts as a metaphor for the shared experience this global phenomenon engendered, on both a small and large scale within the Ottawa community.

Veneration for grandparents ( 1 )

Chinese joss money, velum, silkscreen, wire and thread in a series of masks

Graceina Samosir

Graceina Samosir is an emerging artist working in painting and drawing whose work is driven by her thoughts and sentiments about her family, friends, peers, lovers, ghosts, shadows, pasts, aspirations, and ultimately, herself (and the many parallel or alternate versions of herself). This body of work is composed of drawings made of dry and wet mediums that depict both mundane occurrences and Kodak moments. Moved by images that call to senses and sensibilities, Graceina imbued this work with fragmented movements to underpin the idea of memories displaced in time. The repeated figures interacting within the space depict a sense of play, while the different personas are brought together into a disjointed sequence to suggest that loneliness, although a solitary feeling, can be a shared experience.

REM  

Ink and chalk pastel on paper 27.5” x 19.6”

Nuf!  

Ink and chalk pastel on paper 27.5 x 19.6’’

Cutie  

Ink and chalk pastel on paper 15.7” x 19.6’’

CARE-ATIN  

Ink and chalk pastel on paper 15.7 x 19.6’’

Martin Vuong

Martin Vuong is an Ottawa-based figurative oil painter who creates works inspired by personal history and photographic references. In Mother, Martin uses old family photos to portray the relationship and journey that he and his mother have shared as first-generation immigrants in Canada. The subtly lined background behind the figures was inspired by traditional Vietnamese motifs found in paintings and sculptures; in fact, the soft blue lines reference the mountainous village Martin and his mother left behind before beginning anew in Ottawa. The faces of the figures have been purposely obscured as a device to allow viewers with similar upbringings and stories to identify with the piece, which enables the painting to communicate both a sense of belonging and alienation.

Mẹ  

Oil on panel 30” x 22”