Dreams & Demands
August 1-22, 2024Gallery 115, University of OttawaDreams & Demands started with a series of questions: how do we accept change when it is thrust upon us? How do we find love and care for ourselves when the world betrays us? How do the systems in which we exist tend to, or exacerbate, our wounds? How do we find meaning in a world that is flawed?
In an article entitled “Memory Work” published in canadianart winter 2021, artist Christina Battle reflects on how the cultural remembrance and forgetting of injustice and revolt inform artists’ visions for the future. She ponders: “I wonder how my work would be different if (...) our collective visual culture wasn’t constantly having to reimagine futures bound by the injustices felt across our experience.”
Battle’s article was written in the fallout of summer 2020, which was marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, and generalised disillusion in the face of systemic injustices and failings. The crises we face today have taken new but familiar forms, lending credence to cynicism and hopelessness. By looking toward personal and collective histories, Dreams & Demands responds to Battle’s bid by presenting alternative ideals for our shared futures. Reimagined, tomorrow could be characterised by care, humour, and empathy. We thus invited artists to paint a present worth dreaming of; one that will be worthy of nostalgia. By centring unabashed hope in the face of disaster, this exhibition invites you to revel in collective daydreaming and collaborative problem-solving.
Exhibiting Artists:
Audrey Barr | @oddtreeb
Rebecca Clouâtre | @rebecca.clouatre.art
Samira El-Kassis | @samiraelk
Dion Prints | @dionprints
Isabelle Kosteniuk | @isabelle.exe
Karina Kraenzle | @karinakraenzle
Carmina Miana | @meanugh
Emily Neufeld | @emilyneuf.artConcept Development: Marianne Brown, Brianna Fitzgerald,
Alexia Leana-Kokozaki, Rebecca Rama, Hope Wade
Curatorial Statement: Marianne Brown
Biographies: Marianne Brown & Alexia Leana-Kokozaki
Editor: Brianna Fitzgerald
Exhibition Design: Brianna Fitzgerald & Alexia-Leana Kokozaki
Graphic Design: Izzy Poirier
Communications: Meghan Dubeau
Artist profiles + artwork descriptions
Audrey Barr
Audrey Barr is a multi-disciplinary visual artist born and based in Ottawa. In her exploratory practice, Audrey incorporates elements of figuration, surrealism, and narrative to explore themes of femininity, relationships, fantasy, and nostalgia. Her detailed and childlike imagery, combined with bittersweet storytelling, tug at the emotional implications of intimacy and loss. Audrey is currently working towards a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Studio Arts) at Concordia University.
The Big Heart Haunts, Audrey Barr, Terracotta ceramic sculpture, 8” x 12” x 6”, 2024
The Big Heart Haunts is a physical representation of all the love and hurt that make up a life well-lived. The heavy, thorny triceratops, stomping straight out of a child’s nightmare, evokes the addictive, masochistic comfort found in ruminations on what ifs and nostalgia for what was. The triceratops tells you “you are not alone”; she feels the sharp, stinging, haunting of the big heart too. In a reflection on empathy and self-compassion, Barr invites the viewer to sit with their feelings, and let them pass.
Dion Prints
Dion Prints is a Haitian-Nigerian-Canadian self-taught multimedia artist from Ottawa. She uses photo-based media to form visual languages through scanography, painting and collage. Building on skills learned from her father, Dion taught herself the art of video editing and photography. She later attended a technology concentrated high school, inspiring her to further her skills in photography and design. As a Black artist, her main goal is to artistically showcase Black Canadian culture, particularly Black individuals in their natural, purest and joyful elements. She also explores the nuance of the communities she belongs to and grew up in. Dion’s pieces reflect her search for identity in conjunction with the challenges of living in a predominantly able-bodied space as a black person with a chronic illness. Dion’s work was recently included in the exhibition 83 ‘Til Infinity at the Ottawa Art Gallery.
“My dream is to be free from the shackles of capitalism and live a soft life like a baby"
The 8th World Wonder is Love, Dion Prints, Pigment ink on cotton rag with acrylic paint, 4”x6”, 2024
In this series, Dion Prints slowly unravels a dreamy cloudscape from which emerge lovestruck floating eyes. Inspired by bell hooks’ All About Love, this series fully embraces ethereal romantic imagery to present love both as a practice and aspiration. In Dion’s own words, “the goal is to foster dialogue and reflection on the commonalities and differences regarding our own and others’ definitions of Love.” Echoing hooks’ conception of love as a healing force, Dion thus presents the act of loving, and openness to being loved, as essential steps towards bettering ourselves and the world around us.
Emily Neufeld
Emily Neufeld is a plant-based artist working with materials and tools. And don't call her Shirley.
“I once dreamt that the Power Rangers came into my room, spun my bed around, and threw me out the window. The pink one wasn't as hot as she was on TV.”
Surely You Can't Be Serious?, Emily Neufeld, Foamcore, acrylic paint, wire, string, Various sizes, 2024. Photos: Curtis Perry
With its unfiltered words, Surely You Can't Be Serious? expresses our innate, evolutionary desire to pass things along, to extend our lifespan through other things– whether it be children, stories, carving our initials into a picnic table, family heirlooms, names, or traditions. The installation admits that passing things along in the current state of the world feels more like a challenge than a comfort. Our near future seems to be ever-shifting exercises in adapting, living in impermanence, rather than settling comfortably into the life we built for ourselves and unwrapping gifts of longevity. Who will we pass these gifts along to? When will these gifts be opened? The only thing that feels appropriate to pass along is attitude. Our present is complicated, and we can model how to deal with complications by letting ourselves feel everything. In other words, we can be pissed off, and we can watch comfort shows. We can bemoan dreams that will never come to fruition, and we can enjoy playing make-believe with a kid who demands that you be the dragon this time.
Isabelle Kosteniuk
Isabelle Kosteniuk is an oil painter living in Ottawa. She is deeply influenced by her connection to the Ottawa ecoregion and seeks to explore connections between modern reality and her inner world.
"It takes discipline to be a dreamer. My demand is to stay devoted to dreaming, devoted to the small magic, devoted to the frogs and the goldfinches and the bumblebees, devoted to each other."
Proserpine's Garden, Isabelle Kosteniuk, Oil on canvas, 18"x24", 2024
Proserpine’s Garden examines the nuanced link between contemporary life and the natural world. Its title makes reference to the Roman goddess of fertility, Proserpina (Persephone in Greek), whose chastity was once revered and whose abduction by the god of the Underworld was said to have caused crops to stop growing. Whereas Proserpina once served to explain the changing of seasons, Kosteniuk’s contemporary depiction alludes to a cultural shift towards care, for each-other and mother Earth, in today’s world. The background is based on the pathway through the butterfly meadow at the Arboretum: sprawling, and lush, it is beautifully untameable, despite the gardeners’ best efforts to control it. In this glorious setting, gummy candies, which simulate the sweetness of fruit but pale in comparison, and a male figure, modeled after the artist’s partner, subvert the gendered and prescriptive archetypes of Proserpina. The work can be read as a critical twist on the fabrication of the myth of the garden of Eden: there is no growth without death, no garden without invasive plants, no story of Eden without the built-in fall of Eve. If the ideals with which we grew up cannot be erased, how can they be built upon?
Rebecca Clouâtre
Rebecca Clouâtre is a paper collage artist based in Ottawa, Canada. Through her work, Clouâtre encourages viewers to contemplate the intricacies of nature and our complex relationships with the environment while exploring themes of human connection, motherhood, and feminism. With the intention of bringing attention to environmentalism and forgotten material, much of Clouâtre’s imagery is sourced from a variety of paper-based paraphernalia that have been scavenged and repurposed. In 2020, CBC Arts released a Paper Cuts documentary film about Clouâtre and her artistic process and her work has been exhibited in Canada, the USA. and Australia. After a brief career in historical research and curatorial work, she is now a full-time artist and mother.
"I dream and demand a hell of a lot more empathy."
Snailshell I and Snailshell II 2024, found images, pencil crayon, shell and glue on black paper, 5" x 5"
Snailshell I and Snailshell II are collages inspired by a poem by Canadian author Maureen Scott Harris, titled “Looking at Photographs of My Daughters”. The poem reads:
mesmerized first by the way your hair
spiraled around your perfect baby skulls
mirroring snailshell, galaxy, this
new universe I’d fallen into.
Year after year I looked at you looking away
Being a parent means having to contend with a constant process of letting go while trying to hold on. Looking at one’s children can remind us of time passing too quickly as we dream of remembering cherished moments of parenthood, care, love, and connection.
Karina Kraenzle
Recipient of the 2023 Project X Photography award, Karina Kraenzle is a photo-based, mixed-media artist who combines multiple media with original and found photography, producing bodies of work in series as well as in site-specific installations. An ongoing subject in Kraenzle’s work is photography itself –its special relationship to time, memory, and the uncanny– as well as its unique capacity to contain certain fictions, and uncertain truths.
“I’ve always been a dreamer - and I work out those dreams through my art practice. Part dream, part nightmare, that’s life. Imagination is the best way I know to navigate all that - a practical (and essential) tool for the demands of our times.”
Disembodied (detail), Karina Kraenzle, Photographic collage, 13” x 15” & 13.5” x 16”, 2019
Disembodied is a photographic collage series that evokes a sense of longing and entanglement in its layering of people, objects and places. Earthy tones like brown and gray, with accents of orange and red, color the photographs. Figures are seemingly shifting through different states of the past and future, adding layers of vulnerability and depth to each character.
Carmina Miana
Carmina Miana is an Ottawa-based interdisciplinary artist. Layers of tactility are found in her work, which examines identity, memory and community. Her diasporic identity, having been born in the Philippines and raised in an immigrant suburb of Scarborough, informs the hybridity of her creative practice, which involves stop motion animation, ceramics, cyanotypes, and soft sculpture. Carmina holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration from OCAD University (2017).
“In a world increasingly canned and processed, I dream of a future where our collective appetite for authenticity surpasses our hunger for convenience. We must preserve our humanity by breaking the mold, nourishing our connections, and building a society that values substance over packaging.”
SPAMINA, Carmina Miana, Glazed Ceramic, 5"x 4.5"x 2.75", 2024. Photos: Curtis Perry
SPAMINA embodies the dreams of immigrant success. The ingredients listed at the back of the work not only reflect the legacy of American imperialism in the Philippines but also symbolize the challenges and demands inherent to the artist's experience of immigrating to Canada.
The opened and empty vessel echoes the adage "You are what you eat," a reminder of the relationship between sustenance and identity. Just as physical nourishment shapes us, the cultural narratives and societal structures we consume impact our selfhood.
Through SPAMINA, viewers are invited to contemplate both intergenerational immigrant dreams and the demands imposed to achieve those dreams. The work prompts reflection on the end-of-life of this once recyclable container: can it be (ful)filled? What new possibilities can this vessel hold? And like Pandora's box, can hope can be distilled from this innocuous, but ill-ridden object?
Samira El-Kassis
Samira El-Kassis is a visual artist residing in Ottawa. Her oil paintings pay homage to traditional technique, while bringing her own contemporary vision. Her subject matter deals with beauty found in the mundane, and often touches on what it is like navigating life through the lens of someone living with chronic pain.
“We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world”
– Gabor Maté
I see in your future, Samira El-Kassis, 2024, Oil on canvas, 11”x14”
I see in your future depicts an origami fortune telling game often made in one’s childhood. As young kids, we dreamt of possible futures with excitement and naivety, and as an adult, those same dreams are frequently halted by realities of life. With its subdued grays and blues, the paper fortune teller we all once saw as playful, hopeful and fun also acts as a signifier of an uncertain future and a bygone childhood.