NEXTFEST: VISUAL ART
Curated by Shawnee Danielle
Ariana Ozga-Reinecke
Sleeping Jen
Oil on Canvas Medium
Ariana’s practice frequently begins with digital photography and video performance which she then interprets and responds to using a variety of traditional media. Through this translation, she finds a safe space to explore her feelings. She often works in series, exploring a character or theme that allows her to externalize and give substance to her internal world. Most recently she is exploring memory and connection through relationships in her life.
Elena Murcuri
The World’s Most Exciting Women
Mixed Media, Collage.
My practice seeks to connect with others through humour and shared experience. Artistic research into religion, psychology, beauty, ugliness, and love heavily inform my work. I enjoy working in drawing, painting, collage, and digital formats to talk about the regularness of life and my personal lived experience of being a young girl. My goal is to make work that resonates with others in ways that make them feel “called out” yet included, as if my work both comforts and understands its audience.
Sofya Beloded
The Titan
Acrylic, Soft Pastels, and Oil on Canvas
Exploring the intersections of memory and national culture, my practice draws on my immigrant experiences navigating the diverse environments where I have resided. Through research-driven paintings and collages, I examine the metamorphosis of personal and collective identity, applying these findings to my work in the socially critical contexts of countries that differ drastically in their political landscapes. Coming from Russia, a country which history is marked by change and rewriting, I am deeply influenced by Russian art groups that emerged at the turn of the millennium. These groups reflected on the uncertainties and horrors brought about by the collapse of governmental structures. Drawing conceptual inspiration from artists such as Valeriy Aizenberg, Valeriy Chtak, and Pavel Peppershtein, I incorporate formal approaches of German Neo-Expressionism into my projects, featuring socially critical commentary, references to the art world, and reflections on political dynamics. Working across a wide range of media, I create paintings that are multilayered, born out of continuous exploration, experimentation, and reliance on chance processes. Featuring dissected and distorted elements of the mundane, everyday life, the subjects of my work merge together, revealing themselves under close inspection of the dimensionality and contrasts in textures and technical approaches.
dallas Bartel
28
Acrylic on Canvas
Exploring work with abstract expressionism using acrylic, graphite and ink. Influences of 1950’s to 1970’s design. Using repressed, saturated colours against primary hues, shapes and lines over irrational space.
Agatha Lidia Chacinski
Morning Sadness
Acrylic on Wood Panel
As a self-taught artist I have always found art to be a necessary part of my life. Since I started creating at the age of four, it has been a passion of mine to produce art that pushes the boundaries of my comfort zone. Each piece captures a portion of my soul that I have poured into each work; never limiting myself to one medium of choice. I found my drive for this series in my own personal fight with mental health; hence the DEPRESSION SERIES was created. My goal as an artist is to provoke emotion in the viewer whatever it may be. If a patron stops and feels a connection with my piece, then I have done my job as an artist.
Madelaine Mae Dack
am I still the animal?
Oil on Canvas
In my work, I use elements of collage to discuss modern day social connection and how it is affected by our increasing reliance on technology. I begin by creating digital collages using my mother and I’s photography from my childhood and present day. The collages are used as references for large scale oil paintings that incorporate sporadic mixed media. I use textile elements, foil and other objects to create depth and texture in the finished work. This work focuses on themes of self identity and ageing through the digital era. It utilizes motifs of animals and the natural environment to demonstrate how digital technology pushes humans away from our animal origins. Access to social media and living vicariously through a curated digital presence has removed people from living and sharing their lives in the present, and connecting with their reality. I am exploring the natural herding instincts that are seen in both groups of humans and flocks of sheep, and the distress that isolation causes in herd species.
Friday Smith
Angel
Acrylic on Cradled Wood Panel
I am a settler living and working on Treaty 8 territory. Part diary, part fantasy, my practice spans textiles, painting and animation. Through my practice, I hope to learn from spaces in between; between masculine and feminine, grief and hope, abstraction and legibility. In a world that is so intent on neat categorization, I’m excited by the illegible and the unexplainable.
My view of the world is shaped by the aesthetics of fantasy, sci-fi and internet culture – playful, speculative and juicy worlds. Through my work, I hope to invite this same sense of play and curiosity to areas outside of our knowledge. I want confusion to be a site of play, instead of something to be scared of.
Hannah Cozicar
This Time for Sure
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas
In these works I build off memories and conversations to create work that depicts my feelings, and how I perceive impactful moments in time. This creates a tangible item that I can then analyze to justify feeling the way I do and forces me to become comfortable with my more vulnerable thoughts.
I pull inspiration from memory, song lyrics, words and phrases, as well as from artists like Joram Roukes – with his collage style work, and Ally McIntyre, where the arrangement of subjects in her work interests me. These artists create narratives where the viewer might not catch all the nuance, but they will still attach a meaning to the overall work. That is my goal with this body of work. Putting my feelings out this way allows them to become something more than me and creates the space for others to relate.
Within this body of work, I intend the viewers to relate the paintings, – be that the overall mood, aesthetic, or some small focal point, if there is a moment that sticks out to them.