Brianna Fitzgerald

Brianna Fitzgerald is an artist from Ottawa. She graduated from the Bachelor of Fine Arts program at University of Ottawa, specializing in media art practices and photography in 2018, and was awarded the C.D. Howe Scholarship for Art and Design by the Royal Canadian Academy of Art for her graduate exhibition. Her practice is primarily centered on lens and time based media, as well as electronic art, performance, and installation.

In "I love you so much I want to be you", Brianna Fitzgerald dons the garb (and paper faces) of several of her teen idols and performs as them, mimicking their movements and mannerisms and making others up where references fall short. The title is a hyperbolic reference to the heady lens of admiration, love, and obsession that accompany the teen-fandom crush — perhaps pretending to be a certain musician as you listen to their music, in a bedroom plastered with their face. Fitzgeralds plays with ideas of the put-on/performed personalities of these figures and adopts their personas by mimicking their body language and copying their clothing styles.

I love you so much I want to be you 

Video

7:03 min (video 1 of 2)

2017

Ashley Guenette

Ashley Guenette is a Franco-Ontarian artist from rural Northern Ontario. Using analogue methods to interpret digital content she challenges the aesthetic conventions of fine art while engaging in an ongoing dialogue with its histories. Guenette holds an MFA from the University of Waterloo.

These works by Ashley Guenette were part of her solo show at WKP Kennedy Gallery in North Bay, entitled Put a Finger Down If You’ve Ever Been Personally Victimized By Social Media Algorithms. In this series, Guenette employs comedy and social media lingo to reflect on the experience of being chronically online as a woman. Drawing from algorithmically-generated social media content, Guenette reveals underlying forms of oppression and reframes them using critical, feminist critique.

You're So Easy

Oil stick on canvas

6’x8’

2021

Hot Girls Have Digestive Issues

Water-based paint and oil stick on canvas stuffed with couch foam and pillow filling

4’ Diameter

2022

Thicker Than a Snickers Pt.3

oil stick on canvas stuffed with bean bag filling 

approx. 4' 

2022

Sam Loewen

Sam Loewen is a queer interdisciplinary artist and designer from Alberta. He earned his MFA at the University of Ottawa in 2018. Loewen’s practice explores methods of codification within Western culture to discuss queer ‘masculine’ identities. Using systems of organization and collection to compose his images, he arranges, pairs, groups, stacks, orders, and compiles symbolic images and coded found objects to complicate, alter, and question their meanings.

This selection of works by Loewen explores the codification of sexual and gender identity and desire. By referencing historical and contemporary experiences of queer seduction and romance, some more obvious than others - the Hanky Code in Country Queers, late-night thirst in Read 3:33 AM, and having to fiercely advocate for access to HIV exposure medication in PeP in My Side - under the guise of apparently innocent images, Loewen plays with the hidden meanings of colours, symbols and text, all alluding to the limitless outcomes of embracing a queer existence.

PeP in My Side

Sam Loewen 

Hand-printed on cotton cloth

27"x48" each

2018

Country Queers

Sam Loewen

Over-dyed screen-print on handkerchiefs, modified edition of 20

22"x22"

2019

Pillow Boyfriend with Pearl Necklace 

Sam Loewen

Screenprint on bedsheet, foam, and upholstery tacks on wood panel

10"x10" 

2022

A Twilight Tragedy 

Sam Loewen

Screenprint on bedsheet

10"x10" 

2022

Ralph Nevins

Ralph Nevins is an experimental photographer, digital and installation artist based in Ottawa. Using his computer science, engineering and photography background, he tinkers and plays with cameras and subjects to create uncanny and surreal compositions. Nevins has been exhibiting since 1998 and has had over 15 solo shows. He has a studio in Stafford Studios in the Nepean Creative Arts Centre. His current projects include high speed-high resolution video to still images, new self built digital slitscan cameras, microsecond flash, and various image processing software projects. Some of the slitscan projects have been funded by the Canada Council of the Arts and the City of Ottawa.

By presenting our world through his strange lens, Ralph plays with disruptions in time, space, and meaning, capturing multiple or altered moments and events. Slices is a slit-scan image, meaning Ralph's camera has a single line of pixels rather than a rectangular array in his camera to cause a warped effect on his subject matter. Ralph built the digital camera used for these images himself, making the warps entirely unique. The number of models, their context, and the differentiation between their limbs is thus complicated, resulting in an  abstract, human-like assemblage.

Slices 

Slitscan Photograph

11"x17"

2015

Rebecca Rama

Rebecca Rama is an Ottawa-based artist and art historian whose current works live in word processors or emerge into the physical through performance. Her digital artworks are meant to be small, held close, fetishised like photographs and dispersed beyond their context. Her performances are entangled with the notion of the art object’s destruction to make the definition of art uncomfortable in the hands of the viewer.

Referencing the essays of Walter Benjamin’s, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Hito Steyerl’s “The Poor Image” and the techniques of Filipino piña textile craft, this work is meant to exist as a deteriorating duplicate following the deletion of its original. First presented as a QR code that will lead the spectator to the original work, the spectator has the chance to own the image by taking a screenshot and making a copy. Once copied, the spectator may do what they please with the work: they can make a new artwork, post it to their social media, share it with their friends, etc. As the image circulates with each share, upload or download, the work is able to transform into something new or be no more depending on one’s actions. At the end of a specified time frame, both the QR code and the original will be deleted or destroyed. Only the copies will carry on the original’s history as new versions, translations, or duplicates within new contexts.

∂îgî†å¬  †éx†î¬ (Digital Textile)

Inkjet Print

8"x8"

2023

Greta Grip

Greta Grip is an Ottawa-based conceptual and textile artist. Grip explores the relationship between technology and handmade craft to produce humorous and thought-provoking messaging. Since 2011, she has knitted countless rows of yarn and illuminated wire into QR codes, words and symbols, and has hacked knitting machines, thus making the old new again, and mixing historically slow and meticulous methods with contemporary, programmatic and reproducible technologies. Grip considers knitting as a form of coding, thus raising the question of how to read an image with multiple layers of code embedded in it. Grip once dreamt that she was a giant knitting needle.

easyeasy so you’re and KEEP IT TIGHT: the former a criticism and the latter an order, these works by Greta Grip expose the burden imposed on women to act in accordance with oppressive gender ideals. Shown together, their loud words compete for viewers’ attention, ordering us to stand tall while pushing us into the ground. In her iconic radical fashion, Grip uses humour and wit to make provocative ideas accessible.

KEEP IT TIGHT 

Nylon and wool mix yarn

30"x24"

2022 

easyeasy so you’re 

Acrylic yarn

30"x40"

2023

Anthony Léger

Anthony Léger is an emerging queer French-Canadian artist based in Aylmer (QC). Working mainly through photographic processes while exploring a multitude of diverging avenues and influences, he prefers to use the medium that is best suited for his vision and concept. At the moment, he is exploring the banal, the extraordinary, the quotidian, the online world, as well as the concept of time in occurrence to memories, due to his capability to associate his own memories to the approximate date and time that they happened. Anthony holds visual arts degrees from the Cégep de l’Outaouais and the University of Ottawa.

9:49 PM comments on how clothes may inform and reflect one’s identity and personality. At the same time, it also highlights how clothing items can bring prejudice and give a false sense of who someone might be at first glance, ultimately bringing miscommunication within interactions. As a queer man, Anthony Léger has used both of those interpretive clothing strategies within his personal style, initially using it as a way to mask a part of himself, but now expressing his identity through this method of communication. Portraits are commonly used as a way of communicating one’s identity through facial features and personal items. By omitting the face of the individual in the composition, their identity can only be interpreted through their clothing. The viewer is thus invited to create a narrative and personality for this individual, without further answers being given to them. 

9:49 PM

Acrylic on wood panel

24"x30"

2022

Karen Miller

Karen D. Miller is a textile artist and writer. By employing traditionally feminine and inherently slow mediums, Miller uses her work to draw attention to the overlooked and the undervalued. From her graduate level education in law and social systems through her professional career as a lawyer to her life as a mother, Miller has developed an acute sensitivity to the “shoulds” imposed on women. Her practice thus deconstructs and exposes self-identity and societal perceptions as they relate to women in modern life. Miller’s work has been shown in Canada and the United States and has been included in publications around the globe. She has published two books, Eyes Open to the World: Memories of Travel in Wool and The Art of Mothering: Our Lives in Colour and Shadow. She will soon work towards an MA in Contemporary Art Theory at the University of Ottawa.

Its title, 3,179, is based on the estimated number of lunches Miller will make for her two children in her lifetime, 3,179 draws attention to an often-overlooked act of painstaking, repetitive manual labour required of caretakers (usually mothers). By using the slow and historically feminine medium of crochet to fill a small fridge with sandwiches, juice boxes and clementines, Miller turns an undervalued act of love into an installation that cannot be so easily dismissed.

3,179

Wood and textile installation

3’x2’x1’

2023

Günsu Hayriye Ozan

Multi-disciplinary artist and designer Günsu Hayriye Ozan took a double major in textile design and fashion design at the Fine Arts faculty of Yeditepe University in Istanbul and recently completed fine arts studies at the Ottawa School of Art (2019). Fascinated by the ways in which objects can transcend their original meanings and contexts, in her collages and sculptural work, the transformation of found objects allows new and powerful ideas to emerge from the items she pieces together.

Günsu Hayriye Ozan’s interests in sustainability, spirituality and cross-cultural communication converge in these enormous Prayer Beads. The artist transforms a personal religious object - the prayer bead, rosary or mala - into a blown up, maximalist plastic sculpture. By intricately reproducing a universal symbol of prayer and meditation using upcycled plastic, she recontextualizes both the devotional object and cheap, disposable plastic waste, forcing holy and secular practices into dialogue.

Prayer Beads 

Mixed media with up-cycled plastic, glass beads, and metal

80"x15"

2023

Kathryn Shaw

Using intentional aesthetic choices, multi-disciplinary artist Kathryn Shaw’ goal is to inspire delight and reflection. Shaw is interested in nostalgia and loss, human-environment interaction and memory making through a feminist perspective. She draws inspiration from her multicultural upbringing, fantasy, technology, and nature. Combining traditional materials with innovative methods, she forges connections through time. Shaw holds a Master’s degree in Psychology from the University of Guelph and has attended the Ottawa School of Art since 2020. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, the US, the UK and online.

Fawn’s loud, bright appearance subverts its natural camouflage. Shaw thus calls into question the ways in which appearance, both in animal and human relationships, can protect, conceal, or affirm identity and can enforce or disrupt feelings of safety.

Fawn 

Papier-mâché, cardboard, and armature wire

18"x6"x16"

2022