Leila Syed-Fatemi

Black, Indigenous, People(s) of Colour Artist Residency Recipient

Leila Syed-Fatemi is an artist, curator and community arts worker based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her work stems from her daily experiences as a visible minority and her perspective as a practicing Muslim woman artist. Fatemi aims to provide platforms and contribute alternative narratives to conversations of ethnic representation with a focus on the experience of Muslim women & women from the MENA region, as well as to create a better understanding and appreciation for Islamic culture and traditions. Through her multi-media approach, she challenges the inherently colonial narratives used in Western traditions of misrepresentation of the East.

Left: Leila Syed-Fatemi
Right (artwork): Untitled from the series A Vessel to Bend Water, 2022, screen print on canvas, cyanotype, thread, coins, metal embellishments, wooden dowel, 54″ x 32″.

Eva Fracis-Work

Emerging Printmaker Scholarship Residency Recipient

Eva Francis-Work has just concluded her undergraduate studies at the University of Saskatchewan, completing a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and her Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours degrees. These two subject areas have formed the basis for her artwork, each influencing the other with a recent focus on self-expression. Using herself as subject matter, Eva explores ideas of femininity and self-introspection through subtle humour. Eva’s passion lies in printmaking and digital artwork; bringing these passions together has led to more immersive works.

Left: Eva Francis-Work
Right (artwork): at least I’m funny?, 2022, waterless lithography, edition 1/3, 30″ x 44″.

Joy Wong

Hexagon Mid-Career Artist Member Residency Recipient
& Atelier Circulaire Artist Member Exchange Recipient

Joy Wong is an interdisciplinary artist with immigrant settler heritage in Tkaronto/Toronto. Their practice connects material investigations with the shifting physicality of a racialized and queer body. Lately, their work about mutable surfaces has focused on the metaphors of fermentation, disorientation, and the corporeality of migration. They obtained their BFA from York University and their MFA from Western University. Wong has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. They were a finalist for the 2018 RBC Canadian Painting Competition and were the 2019 Pope Artist in Residence at NSCAD.

Left: Joy Wong
Right (artwork): Untitled (a fervid surface 1), 2021, oiled and dried kombucha SCOBY impressed with net design, oil paint, oxidization from copper, thread, wood, approx. 30″ x 40″.

Gabrielle Tyrie

Jeannie Thib Emerging Artist Recipient

Gabrielle Tyrie is a photographer and artist based out of Toronto, Canada. She specializes in cyanotype. As a medium, it connects her to photography’s past and its origins. It is scientific and requires applied technique. She is inspired by materials as a means to explore, art history, science and ideas of femininity. It puts her in conversion with early female photographers as a way to make space for her nuanced contemporary womanhood.

Left: Gabrielle Tyrie
Right (artwork): Untitled Crochet Work, 2022, cyanotype on cotton, synthetic fibre yarns, 8” x 33”.

Sylvat Aziz

Nick Novak Mid-Career Printmaker Residency Recipient

Sylvat Aziz trained at universities in Lahore, Pakistan; Pratt Institute NYC, USA and Concordia, Montreal, Quebec, where she earned undergraduate degrees in the sciences and graduate degrees in comparative literature and visual art. She was awarded the full-year residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts and has held several funded residences in North America, the UK, Europe and South Asia. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally; venues include the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Symposia,  National Gallery of Pakistan, Art Bank, Canada Council,  Cartwright Hall Bradford England, Nickle Arts Museum, Calgary, Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton and Eicher Gallery, New Delhi.

Her work engages the mythologies and histories of material culture and the visual documents inherent of stressed societies in war and political unrest.

Currently, she bases her research in Cyprus (Nicosia/Kyrenia) and Lahore, Pakistan. She teaches in the Fine Art (Visual Art) Program and is cross-listed with the Department of  Cultural Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.

Left: Sylvat Aziz
Right (artwork): Detail of Three Block War in a VUCA World, 2018, transfer images on mylar, block prints, ads, oils, 1/1/, 52″ x 57″.

Rafa Santos

Visiting Artist Residency Recipient

Rafa Santos’ work fragments both real and imaginary moments in Caribbean and Mediterranean history with artistic liberty. They address the subject of identity with both a private and a public voice at once. Post-minimalist and undisciplinary in their aesthetic, Santos strives to embed something irrational in the seemingly decipherable composition of their work.

Rafa’s work has been exhibited as part of the AIR Vallauris residency and the Celine Bureau residency, as well as at Concordia University’s FOFA Gallery.

Born in Toronto, raised in Ottawa, of Afro-Dominican and Italo-Canadian descent, Rafa’s artistry is currently based in Montreal.

Left: an image of the artist, Rafa Santos
Right (artwork): Detail of Just Me and You, 2021, My grandparents’ books, pewter, pastel on cotton placemats, found objects. Installation view, dimensions variable.

Kara Springer

Visiting Artist Residency Recipient

Born in Barbados, Kara Springer lives and works in Toronto and New York. Her practice is particularly concerned with armature – the underlying structure that holds the flesh of a body in place. She uses photography, sculpture, and site-specific interventions to confront and engage with architecture, urban infrastructure, and institutional and political power systems. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Toronto), Artists Space (New York), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), the National Gallery of the Bahamas, the National Gallery of Jamaica, and the Frankfurt Museum of Applied Arts. She is an alum of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art and recently held a 2-year fellowship with the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

Left: an image of the artist, Kara Springer
Right (artwork): the earth and all its inhabitants, wood, primer, industrial lightbox, cart made of found materials.

Jasmin-Nicole Amoako

Virtual REsidency Recipient

Jasmin-Nicole Amoako (she/her) is a Ghanaian Canadian emerging visual artist based in Toronto. She is a graduate of the Drawing and Painting program from the Ontario College of Art and Design University (2021). Her artwork depicts contemporary visuals of Black womanhood and West African culture. Through figurative painting, abstract art, and sacred African braiding practices she applies African and Western methodologies to articulate her cultural identity. Amoako’s artwork combines themes that examine healing, nature, and meditation to create large-scale portraits and abstract dreamscapes. During this residency, she will develop an artist wellness series focusing on collaboration, identity, memory, and selfhood.

Sonali Menezes

Virtual REsidency Recipient

Sonali Menezes (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Hamilton, ON. She tries her best to eat three meals a day and is the youngest of triplets. While her work spans many mediums, she has been most recently focused in poetry, video, printmaking and zines. Right now her work is focused on care. Care for herself, care for her body, care for kin and community. Meneze’s is hoping to find more balance between her day job in arts administration and her artistic practice so she can spend less time on emails and more time on art-making, got any tips?

Megan Feheley

Virtual REsidency Recipient

Megan Feheley is a two-spirit Ililiw (Cree) interdisciplinary artist and curator living and working out of Toronto, Ontario. They are currently working towards their BFA in Indigenous Visual Culture at OCAD University, and work predominantly in sculpture/installation, beadwork, textiles, painting and video. Feheley’s art-making is based in collaboration with community and land, with specific interests in knowledge transmission, resurgent material practices, environmental justice and decolonial approaches to art-making.

Cleopatria Peterson

Black, Indigenous, People(s) of Colour Artist Residency Recipient

Cleopatria Peterson (they/them) is an award-winning black non-binary trans-multi-disciplinary artist. They are an illustrator, author, facilitator and co-founder of Old Growth Press. The themes of their work explore their own identity and narratives that are both personal and fantastical. They love printmaking through screen printing, letterpress and linocut. They are interested in using these skills to create objects that can be easily disseminated and hope to expand on their thesis from OCAD. Through this residency, they will create work and print ephemera that will work to empower black, queer and/or trans folks.

Image R: Envelope, letterpress on kraft cardstock, 7.75″ x 4”. Coupons, screenprint on 80lb cardstock, series of 4, 5″ x 2”. About the artwork: this was a mailer designed by Trans for Trans, playing on the term T4T. It features a variety of coupons that parodied corporations by including important resources that not only transgender but BIPOC, queer, and disabled folks need. The coupons are funny but also work to address the inaccessibility of things such as hormone replacement therapy and top surgery. The coupons imagine a world where you can go to the mall and get things that are necessary for people to live and survive. The use of parody allows an access point to something that is actually a very harsh reality for many trans people.

Karen Kar Yen Law

Emerging Printmaker Scholarship Residency Recipient
(formerly: Don Phillips Scholarship)

Karen Kar Yen Law (she/her) is a first-generation Cantonese Chinese-Canadian who lives and practices in Tkaronto. Law is a recent graduate from Queen’s University with a BFA (Honours) and BEd. Her practice blends printmaking and painting techniques to produce an artistic approach that is intuitive and reactive. Through the language of multiples, gradients, masking, and mark-making, Law reproduces cultural iconography to imagine and explore her relationship to the Chinese diaspora and to Canadian culture. Law uses her practice to design a lexicon that describes encounters with multiculturalism, assimilation, whiteness, and racism in Canada.

K. MacNeil

Hexagon Mid-Career Artist Member Residency Recipient
(formerly: Hexagon Special Projects Fellowship Residency)

K. MacNeil (they/them) is a genderqueer/trans artist who was born and raised in the US, currently living in St. Catharines. They completed their BA in Studio Art from the College of Charleston (2011), and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Buffalo (2018).

MacNeil maintains an interdisciplinary practice that encompasses print media, video, performance, and drawing. Their work explores experiences of trauma, grief, and mental distress and the various ways these topics are obscured in Western culture. During their residency, MacNeil will be producing a series of etchings that examine and critique the spaces of institutionalized healthcare.

Samsam Elmi

Jeannie Thib Emerging Artist Member Residency Recipient
(formerly: Jeannie Thib Mentorship Residency)

Samsam Elmi (she/her) is a Toronto-based artist, who holds an honours BFA in Visual Art from York University. Mainly utilizing the intaglio and screenprinting processes, she focuses on the exploration of mark-making juxtaposed with representational imagery. She begins with a phrase or sentiment that organically evolves, highlighting words with double meanings or following cyclical thought processes. Elmi documents and wants to accept each act as an irreversible process as it occurs. Through the exploration of mark-making, she hopes to showcase a visual representation of the inner mind that continues to shape her outlook as both a person and artist.

Francisco-Fernando Granados

Nick Novak Mid-Career Printmaker Residency Recipient
(formerly: Nick Novak Fellowship Residency)

Francisco-Fernando Granados (he/him) was born in Guatemala and lives in Toronto, traditional Anishnabeg and Haudenosaunee territory. He uses abstraction as a queer conceptual strategy to create multidisciplinary projects that range from installation and performance to drawing and bookmaking. This practice of minor abstraction has developed from the intersection of formal training in painting and printmaking, working through artist-run culture, studies in feminist theory, and early activism as a peer support worker with immigrant and refugee communities. Layering these experiences has trained his intuitions to seek site-responsive approaches, alternative forms of distribution, and the weaving of lyrical and critical propositions.

Meggan Winsley

Atelier Circulaire Artist Member Exchange Recipient

Meggan Winsley (she/her) is a Toronto-based artist. She received her BFA from York University in 2004 and the Art Fundamentals Certificate course from Sheridan College in 1999. She became a member of Open Studio in 2005 and began teaching shortly after. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and held in both public and private collections. She is currently teaching screenprinting courses at Open Studio. In her work, Winsley uses masks and animal heads to explore therianthropy (the ability to metamorphose into other animals and other identities) and also delusion and confusion in regards to self-identity and persona.

Extended 2019-20 Opportunities

Lavinia Lindsay

Don Phillips Scholarship Residency Recipient

Lavinia Lindsay grew up in Niagara Falls Ontario, which has been a major source of inspiration for her work. She is a recent graduate of the University of Guelph Bachelor of Arts program, where she was first introduced to printmaking in 2015. She is now focused on intaglio etching, mezzotint, and how printmaking and animation can work together.

Drawing inspiration from the degradation of her hometown, Lavinia strives to contrast the advertised ideals of Niagara with the uncanny realities of what growing up there was actually like, from her perspective.  Her work often begins as a political commentary on the tourist industry and attempts to expand into a more poetic reflection of comfort. Lavinia thinks storytelling and knowledge are important elements of art, and she tries to capture these notions in her work: be it through the titles of her prints, or by creating intentional variations within an edition. Her practice is very process-driven, and sometimes becomes physically demanding, especially when rocking her mezzotint plates by hand. With this residency, she plans to continue creating animations from prints, and she would like to continue analyzing her hometown and Niagara Falls tourism through a critical lens.

Alison Judd

Hexagon Special Projects Fellowship Residency Recipient

Alison Judd’s practice is rooted in printmaking at the intersection of print, sculpture and language. She uses earthly phenomena to ruminate on transience, impermanence, and loss, as well as the slow accumulation and distillation of knowledge.

A ‘fact’ is a thing that is known, or proved to be true,
a ‘fracture’ is the act or process of breaking or the state of being broken,
and ‘facture’ is the manner in which something is made.

During the Hexagon Fellowship Residency, Judd will work with these definitions as concept, materials and process. She will create a series of works where scientific texts and geological descriptions are mined for poetry and pair this with letterpress, relief and etching processes. Judd is interested in the discrepancy between logical language and the ineffable and how we struggle to find and express meaning. She is particularly compelled by how such representations can strip away emotional and relational complexity, how metaphor and materiality can restore a nuanced understanding to what is and is not.

Judd holds a diploma from the Ontario College of Art, Toronto, a BFA in Printmaking from Concordia University, Montreal, and completed her Masters of Fine Art in Print Media at York University. She has exhibited work nationally and internationally and has been awarded residencies at the Kloster Bentlage Cultural Centre, (Rheine, Germany), the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture, (Dawson City, YK), the Banff Centre for the Arts (Banff, AB) and the Druckwerk Printmaking Studio (Basel, Switzerland). She is Assistant Professor in Printmaking at OCAD University in Toronto.

Victoria Day

Jeannie Thib Mentorship Residency Recipient

Victoria Day creates screenprints, murals, and drawings that examine themes of gender, self-indulgence, and mental health through an autobiographical lens. She is inspired by the duality of the internal – the mind, identity, thought – and the external – the body, society, action. Her practice explores the fluctuating relationship between these elements through self-portraiture, bridging her interior landscape with her exterior form.

During the Jeannie Thib Mentorship Residency, Day will be combining her drawing and printmaking practices to produce a series of images that have been passed through repeated digital and analog manipulations. She hopes that her experiments will lead to work that gives pause to the rapid image consumption of the times and will raise the question …what is this? …how was it made?

Michelle Forsyth

Nick Novak Fellowship Residency Recipient

While not technically considered a printmaker, Michelle Forsyth employs a wide range of copying in her practice and calls attention to the nature of the multiple. Her current work consists of photographic prints depicting hand-crafted items such as screenprints, lithographs, paintings, weavings, and sculptures. These items are copies of things that are dear to her and she outlines those sentiments in text passages that accompany her work when exhibited.

The work she will complete at Open Studio will follow along this trajectory but will more specifically address the self, performing in the home, and the body in relation to illness and disability. Forsyth will complete a series of six life-sized self-portraits. Each work will focus on repeat patterns, printed on fabric and on papier-mâché forms. The textiles will be sewn into tight-fitting garments and the sculptural forms will be made to wear as jewelry or accessories. Ultimately this work will be reproduced as digitally-printed self-portraits. In the finished works, the printed matter will be predominant.

Inspired by the figures captured in interior decorating and lifestyle magazines, the work will picture her body interacting within her home. Here the body will uncover her struggle to perform once mundane tasks. Ultimately the work will be performance-based. Here her body, with all its renewed achievements, will seem beautiful, transcendent, and effervescent through the exploration of the qualities of movement that are unique to it.

Nix Burox

Don Phillips Scholarship Residency Recipient

Nix Burox is a non-binary trans artist based in Montreal. Interested in process-oriented art, their work references archiving practices and takes the form of modular interactive art objects such as sets of cards, artist books, and installations. Using autobiography as a tool to discuss issues of identity and mental health, Burox is interested in queer and small press initiatives and was a founding member of the Concordia Queer Print Club. They have recently completed a BFA in Print Media at Concordia University and are the 2017 recipient of the Wendy Simon award. They have participated in a number of exhibitions and residencies, including a collaborative residency at Gravity Press Experimental Print Shop in Massachusetts and most recently a research/creation residency at the Concordia Fine Arts Reading Room.

Burox’s practice exposes the futile search for a coherent narrative through which to consolidate personal identity and experiences, using autobiography as a tool to understand the world. During their residency, they will work to expand and complexify their use of the archive as a framework for reinterpreting and recontextualizing the subjective. They are interested in discussing the topic of embodiment, particularly as related to their experience of anxiety, transness, and situating themselves in new spaces and environments. They will be working across print mediums, with an emphasis on woodcut and small-scale works that build towards a larger collection, assemblage, or installation.

Loree Ovens

Hexagon Special Projects Fellowship Residency Recipient

Loree Ovens specializes in intaglio techniques: especially copper etching, aquatint, drypoint and collagraph. Primarily working with Japanese Washi paper and often combining the use of surface design techniques for textiles, Ovens’ fascination with line, pattern, and architecture continues to inspire her work.

Ovens studied Fashion Technique and Design at PEI’s Holland College. She continued her studies and received an arts diploma from Sheridan College, SOCAD, majoring in fabrics. Subsequently, Loree had a two-year residency in the textile studio at the Harbourfront Craft Studio. In 2008, she earned a BFA in Printmaking from OCADU and began printing at Open Studio. She is represented by David Kaye Gallery. She has shown in national and international exhibitions in Canada, Japan, United States, Taiwan, Australia and Scotland. Her work is part of both private and public collections.

I thrive on exploring new ways of working and pushing boundaries of what could be realized in my creative process. I have always been fascinated with science and the natural world. Using a digital camera microscope I plan to take photographs of plant, sand and water samples. Interpretations of my findings will be the starting point of the work that I would create at Open Studio, through etching, embossing and screen.

My inspiration for this project evolves around the work of Günter Haese, a German sculptor and printmaker linked to kinetic art. The intricacy of Haese’s kinetic sculptures in metal energizes me to look at printmaking beyond a two-dimensional form.

Mark Bath

Jeannie Thib Mentorship Residency Recipient

Mark Bath is a visual artist from Newfoundland. At Memorial University, he studied Dramatic Literature and Creative Writing and later pursued a Bachelor of Design in Illustration at OCADU. While at OCADU, Bath fell in love with the process of creating copper plate etchings and completed a series of intricately detailed self-portraits as part of a student residency with Working Title Press at OCADU.

During the Jeannie Thib Mentorship Residency, Bath will create a series of etchings called Draped in Net. These prints will comprise a wordless storybook telling a fictionalized and tragic tale of Newfoundland resettlement. The story looks at trauma, migration and nostalgia through the lens of memory. Bath will work with mentor and printmaker Emma Nishimura for the planning, execution and presentation of Draped in Net.

Agata Derda

Nick Novak Fellowship Residency Recipient

Agata Derda was born in Poland to a working-class family. She began her art education at a local youth centre and later studied at the high school of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland. In 2010 Derda completed a BFA with Honours in Printmaking at the Galway Mayo Institute of Technology, Ireland. Derda immigrated to Edmonton in 2011 where she completed an MFA at the University of Alberta in 2013. Derda has exhibited in Hamilton, Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver as well as internationally in Slovakia, Poland, China, the United States, Ireland, France, and the UK. She recently won an award at the International Print Triennial in Krakow, Poland. She lives and works exclusively on her art practice in Toronto.

Derda’s art practice is centered on the creation of large prints, which combine both linocut and digital printmaking techniques. Her work often responds to and comments on contemporary social issues related to the injustices of cultural deprivation, such as the normalization of violence and sexual assault.

The Don Phillips Scholarship and Nick Novak Fellowship residencies each entitle the recipient to rent-free access to studio facilities for a period of one year; materials assistance; professional development opportunities; and tuition-free access to Open Studio workshops. In addition, each artist will mount an exhibition of the work created during their time at Open Studio. Each recipient will commence their residency periods in September 2018, with an exhibition of the outcomes of their time at Open Studio scheduled for January 2020.