Rafa Santos

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

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.

Dorian FitzGerald

Dorian FitzGerald makes monumental paintings of materially excessive situations, using an idiosyncratic technique he has been refining for several years. Past subject matter includes the dining room of Stefano Gabbana’s yacht; Drummond Gardens, the oldest privately held formal gardens in the United Kingdom; the VIP room in the Casa de Musica in Lisbon; and the oldest crown found in Europe. He lives and works in Toronto, where he is represented by the Clint Roenisch Gallery.

Note: Visiting Artist residency extended (selected in 2021-22) due to Covid19.

Nour Bishouty

Working in images, video and text, Nour Bishouty’s multidisciplinary and often autobiographical practice draws upon familial and material narratives to explore and rethink the construction of popular identity in relation to narratives and histories of place. Bishouty was a fellow at Home Workspace Program at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2014/15) and an inaugural artist in residence at “Twenty-Three Days at Sea” Traveling Artist Residency (2016). Her artist book 1—130 edited by Jacob Korczynski will be published in 2020.

Rachel Crummey

Crummey states the following about her practice:

I am a visual artist and writer.  I offer rhythmic resting places, for tired eyes and exhausted bodies.  My research interests include landscape, poetry, and abstraction.  I am curious about how the natural and built environment impacts us subliminally, particularly the nervous system.  The logic of machines is all around me in the city, but I am intrigued by root systems and the murmuration of starlings.  When I sit quietly, I sometimes sense an order that is intricate, connected, and spreading.

Rachel Crummey is a visual artist and writer based in Toronto.  She has been an artist in residence with Kulturkontakt Austria and the Salzburger Kunstverein, and has exhibited in Canada, London UK, Austria, and Italy.  Her poetry has been published in The Puritan and Maisonneuve.  She gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council.

Laura Findlay

Laura Findlay works primarily with painting and sculpture. Her work explores the relationship between destruction and creation through confrontations between naturalism and supernaturalism. She considers the psychic and subconscious communication and knowledge that emerges in response to histories of trauma, to ask how a destructive event can become a constructive origin.

Laura Findlay (b. Montreal) is a Toronto based artist. She was the 2017 Brucebo Foundation artist-in-residence in Gotland Sweden, and has been a resident at the Banff Centre, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been supported by the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council.

Kotama Bouabane

Kotama states the following about his practice:

The research that drives my artistic endeavors explores the relationship between image and object through an experimental ethnographic approach. The history and conventions of the photographic medium itself contributes to how I am able to study, subvert and challenge issues of representation, identity and place.

These ideas are not fixed, frozen in time but instead constantly moving and in flux. Within my practice, I exploit the tension between the real and the imagined, truth versus fiction and the illusion of space in and out side of the photographic frame.

Kotama Bouabane is a Laotian born artist and educator. He is a sessional instructor in Photography at OCAD University and holds an MFA in Studio Arts in Photography from Concordia University.
He has shown extensively throughout Canada in notable galleries including Centre A, Vu Photo, Contemporary Calgary, Parisian Laundry and Gallery TPW.

His work has been published in Prefix Photo, Art Papers, Ciel Variable and most recently contributed to The Making of An Archive, initiated by artist Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn. Bouabane has received funding through the Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Art. He is currently the Co-President of the Board of Directors at Gallery 44 Centre For Contemporary Photography.

Meaghan Hyckie

Meaghan Hyckie is a Toronto-based visual artist. Her work is about space: how to represent it and what it feels like to be in it.

Meaghan Hyckie has been a resident at Vermont Studio Centre, the Banff Centre, and was a 2018 Doris McCarthy Artist-in-Residence. Her work has been supported by the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Meaghan Hyckie is represented by Olga Korper Gallery.

Luke Painter

Luke Painter is an artist and professor working in Toronto. Recent exhibitions of his work include: Modern Wand at Cambridge Galleries (solo 2017) and Ways of Something at the Whitney Museum of American Art (group 2016). Luke has received grants from Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council.

Painter states the following about his practice:

As a practicing artist, drawing has been at the core of my work and an important way of researching art and design movements, technology and contemporary life. Through the physical act of drawing, I look for formal, historical and tangential connections between images as a method to highlight and rework them for the purpose of reflection.

Annie Wong

Annie Wong is a multidisciplinary artist and writer. Her work uses various platforms of participation, social engagement, and collaboration to explore the intersections of the poetic and political in everyday life. Conceptually diverse, her recent works focus on spaces for feminist anger and rituals of ancestral remembrance in the Chinese-Canadian diaspora. 

Wong’s work has been presented by the Gardiner Museum, The Art Gallery of Ontario, Third Space Gallery (Saint John, NB), among others. Recent writing has appeared in the Minnesota Review, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Art; and Canadian Art. She holds a MA in Communication and Culture and a BA in English Literature from York University.

Erika DeFreitas

Erika DeFreitas is a Scarborough-based multidisciplinary conceptual artist. Placing an emphasis on process, gesture and documentation, her work explores the influence of language and loss on the formation of identity with the use of textile-based works and performative actions, which are photographed. DeFreitas has shown nationally and internationally, including Project Row Houses and the Museum of African American Culture, Houston, the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto, and the Art Gallery of Mississauga. She has participated in artist residencies in Trinidad and Winnipeg. She was a recipient of the Toronto Friends of Visual Artist’ 2016 Finalist Artist Prize, the 2016 John Hartman Award, and longlisted for the 2017 Sobey Art Award. DeFreitas holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.

Maura Doyle

Maura Doyle lives and works in Ottawa. Her multidisciplinary practice has included video, ceramics, sculpture, printed matter and drawing. Her most recent work, titled Gone: Removed public art in Ottawa / Anishinaabeg Aki is an artist’s publication commissioned by the Ottawa Art Gallery. She has exhibited her work across Canada in artist-run centres and art institutions, as well as internationally in New York, Japan, Sweden and Vienna. Doyle is represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art in Toronto (http://paulpetro.com).

Tina Helen

Tina Helen is a visual artist based in Copenhagen. Her artistic practice proposes a synthesis of the practical and the theoretical in the understanding and production of images. She is engaged with questions of urban politics, power structures (economic, social or psychological), image politics, cognitive capital, self-schooling, refusal, migration, autism, autonomy, collective forms of being, escape and issues of artistic practice and organization. Engaged on a personal and political level, she explores ways to bring together the fields of visual art, knowledge production and activism.

Tina Helen holds an MFA in Critical & Pedagogical Studies from Malmö Art Academy (2011-2013) and an MA in Visualization from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design (2000-2006). She has been an artist in residency at Skaftfell Residency Program in Iceland, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Kunsthuis SYB in The Netherlands and Townhouse Gallery in Cairo. Previous projects include: Workshops at Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, MMCC Culture house in Kabul and SAWA-Outreach program in Cairo; exhibitions at Critical Distance in Toronto, Vejle Art Museum, Minuit Vernissage in Copenhagen and solo exhibitions at Hospital Prison University Archive and Danske Grafikere in Copenhagen; as well as contributions to numerous art and critical theory publications. She is a part of the critical visual collective Frisk Flugt, and the art collective FACTORY WORKERS UNITE. Tina Helen is artist in residence at Open Studio as a part of the collective Frisk Flugt.

Sidney Masuga

Sidney Masuga is an interdisciplinary artist working between digital and analogue mediums; she holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Coming from a background in illustration her work utilizes symbol, form and abstraction to articulate her interests in language women’s history, data analysis and metaphysics. Places of recent exhibition include Art Metropole (Toronto, ON), Redline (Denver, Colorado), The Kitchenette (Toronto, ON) and Sea Foam (Toronto, ON).

Jaime Angelopoulos

Jaime Angelopoulos writes the following about her art practice:

In my art practice I translate immaterial experiences of sensation, emotion and behaviour into physical form. My work evokes human gesture while narrative based titles invite identification within the viewer. The process of writing gives rise to personal experiences that underlie and motivate my actions in the studio. Drawing is a critical tool for mapping out ideas and emotions through and immediate and exploratory process. Ultimately it is my hope to reflect on contemporary social experience.

Jaime Angelopoulos is a Toronto based artist working in the mediums of sculpture, drawing, collage and installation. She received an MFA from York University, BFA from NSCAD University and also studied at Meadows School of the Arts in Dallas. She was awarded the Hazelton Sculpture Prize in 2013 and has participated in artist residencies at KulttuuriKauppila Art Centre in Finland and the Banff Centre for the Arts. Her work has been included in exhibitions and art fairs in Canada, USA and Europe with recent solo exhibitions at Parisian Laundry (Montreal), MKG 127 (Toronto), Musee Regional De Rimouski (Quebec) and the McLaren Art Centre (Ontario).

Panya Clark Espinal

Panya Clark Espinal is a multi-media installation artist who investigates the mechanisms of cultural representation and their silent influence over our perceptions of the world. Through site-specific installations, exhibitions and public commissions, she brings renewed intimacy to the act of looking while raising questions about issues of authenticity, appropriation, reproduction, collection, and display.

In her project for Open Studio titled Material Redistribution she is exploring the co-existence of materiality and image by printing images of bricks with pigment made from ground bricks.

Panya Clark Espinal lives and works in Toronto, Canada. She graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1988, receiving the Governor General’s Award for her work in Experimental Art and Sculpture Installation. She is current candidate in the Criticism and Curatorial Masters Program at OCADU. Solo exhibitions include the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Canadian Embassy (Tokyo), the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, the National Gallery of Canada, Oakville Galleries, and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery. She has also exhibited in England, Italy, and Spain. As an active producer of public art commissions, she has created pieces for such prominent organizations as the Toronto Transit Commission, Covenant House, and various community institutions in and around Toronto. Her work is included in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada.

Colin Miner

Colin Miner’s practice considers an ontological anxiety that shadows the photographic and the production of meaning offered in qualities of relations (lightness, darkness, reflection, refraction). This takes form through assemblage, composition, and duration, with projects developing in the spaces of crossing paths. Writing and the artist project Moire have become articulations of an expanding practice in which the political becomes visible through the absent, cyclical, and askew. Miner is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, recently in the Peruvian Amazonia, and has presented exhibitions in Canada, China, and Germany. He holds an MFA (UBC) and PhD (Western) in Visual Arts and Culture.

Susy Oliveira

Susy Oliveira is a Toronto based artist working in photography, sculpture and collage. Selected exhibitions include shows at The Hole, New York; Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto; SAW Gallery, Ottawa; Khyber, Halifax and PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts, Winnipeg. Her work is represented by Erin Stump Projects (ESP), Toronto.

Daniel Barrow

Daniel Barrow is a Winnipeg-born, Montreal-based artist who works in video, film, print-making and drawing, but is best known for his use of antiquated technologies, his “registered projection” installations, and his narrative overhead projection performances. Barrow describes his performance method as a process of, “creating and adapting comic narratives to manual forms of animation by projecting, layering and manipulating drawings on overhead projectors”.

Barrow has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad. He has performed at The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), PS1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen(2014), The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s TBA festival (2009/2013), and the British Film Institute’s London Film Festival (2010). Barrow is the winner of the 2010 Sobey Art Award as well as the recipient of the 2013 Glenfiddich Artist in Residence Prize.

Sameer Farooq

practice – an archeology of the present – is location-based, and is in dialogue with diverse cultural communities. He investigates tactics of representation and enlists the tools of installation, print media, and the methods of anthropology to explore various forms of collecting, interpreting, and display. In this way, his projects aim to build alternative structures to incorporate the multiple stories, simultaneous experiences, and shared fictions that make our lives so unwieldy. The result is often a collaborative work which counterbalances how dominant institutions speak about our lives: a counter-museum, new additions to an existing archive, or a buried history made visible.

His current research is focused on how to materialize the invisible within the museum: the shape inside of our digital trashcans, fragments of gossip overheard, and the stooping body expressing ‘overwhelm-ment’ which must find a rightful place beside our masks, tools, and manuscripts. His residency will centre around the creation of language-based works culled from the headlines of newspapers in Toronto published by specific cultural communities. In Toronto where “diversity” is used as a currency to construct the global city, what insights do these sources offer when their voices are elevated through several material techniques?

Lee Henderson

work focuses on understanding problems, with an awareness that the work of the artist lies in revealing false problems rather than solving real ones. Through his process he latches onto a piece of material, or a historical factoid, or the cultural baggage of an object, or a quirk of language, and becomes fascinated – obsessed until is reveals the mortal banality of its associations. Those associations – networks of the human intellectual emotional investment, vulgarly known as “meaning” – then find expression in reconfigurations of light, text, space, sound, and matter.

His residency project will centre around a quirk of history. 1492, a year practically synonymous with colonial expansionism, is the same year that the Arches paper company was founded in France. Arches paper, since, have been a much-coveted artist’s supply, a way of letting that most bourgeois-democratic of materials (printing paper) connote the luxury and opulence of European imperial-ecclesiastical power; paper more generally ties itself to colonial power as the map that charts the territory, and the constant “proof” of ownership.

Kathleen Ritter

practice explores questions of visibility, especially in relation to systems of power, language, and technology. Working across the mediums of video, sound, and print, her work investigates relationships between politics and aesthetics, specific histories and contemporary experience, the space of the museum and the street. Her recent research has investigated different modes of encoded communication, camouflage, and subterfuge in the context of early 20th century military technologies, women’s suffrage, and avant-garde movements in culture. From this research, she has been excavating notable patterns and auditory cues, film footage, and writing systems a century old, and examining places where they overlap.

Mining the intersecting histories of military technology, feminism, and the cultural avant-garde, she is interested in patterns that appear to overlap between very different fields. For example, the bold, asymmetrical patterns in Cubist painting were so similar to those found in dazzle camouflage that Picasso famously claimed to have invented it himself. During this time of immense political unrest and sweeping change, anxiety about shifting societal roles and the growing emancipation of women was registered – aesthetically – on the surfaces od things: on fabric patterns, on the printed page, on painted canvas. Ritter’s work during her residency will be to create a series of silkscreen prints based on these intersecting histories; prints that function as artworks as well as templates for fabric patterns.

Stephanie Cormier

Stephanie Cormier was born in Montreal, has lived in Barbados, England and currently resides in Toronto with her six-year-old daughter. She competed her BFA at OCADU and her MFA at The University of Guelph.

Much of Cormier’s work is project based and has taken different directions and mediums over the years. She works in sculpture, installation, photography, collage and video. Some things that connect her work and research are the attention to objects and materials as they relate to the human, and our perception and phenomena of experiencing the world. There is special attention to wonder, speculation and the limits of human understanding and expression.

Mario Doucette

Mario Doucette is an Acadian artist from Moncton, NB. He is a painter, but also works with video, digital animation, performance and Super8 film. In 2004, after a residency in the French village of Brouage, he created Histoires, a series of works combining drawing and painting that reflects on the effects of colonialism. He has been featured in many exhibitions in several Canadian museums and galleries, notably at Toronto’s ROM where he was a Sobey Art Award finalist in 2008. He recently contributed work to Oh Canada in 2012 (MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA), The Painting Project in 2013 (Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal, QC), and Shine a Light: Canadian Biennial in 2014 (National Art Gallery, Ottawa, ON). He is currently working on a new series of paintings and sculptures called Harias. Mario Doucette is represented by Galerie Division (Montréal/Toronto).

Liza Eurich

Liza Eurich completed her BFA from Emily Carr University in 2010 and her MFA from Western University in 2012. She co-publishes the online project Moire and recently completed international residencies in the UK at Glasgow Sculpture Studios and Acme Studios. Her work has been exhibited by MKG127, Neutral Ground, Hamilton Artists Inc., Plug-In ICA, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, the McIntosh Gallery, and the Power Plant Gallery. She has forthcoming exhibitions at Open Studio and G Gallery.

Jacob Whibley

A graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design and a former member (2005-2011) of Toronto collective Team Macho, Jacob Robert Whibley has exhibited locally (Narwhal Contemporary, Oakville Galleries, Harbourfront Centre, Art Toronto), in the US (White Walls Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Pulse, New York, NY; Pulse, Miami, FL; Expo Chicago, Chicago, IL), and in Europe (Bourouina Gallery, Berlin, DE; l’Espace de l’Art Concret, Mouans-Sartoux, FR; Art Brussels, Brussels, BE). His work is in the collections of RBC, BMO and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Hazel Meyer

From the monumental to the modest, Hazel Meyer’s projects range from large installations to small woven tags meant for an audience of one. She explores seemingly disparate yet overlapping preoccupations—intestines and athletics, feminism and the absurd, anxiety and textiles—using scale, language, play, repetition, gentle confrontation and ecstatic immersion. She holds an MFA from OCAD University, Toronto, a BFA from Concordia University, Montréal and coaches junior girls basketball at Queen Victoria Public School in Toronto. Meyer would like to acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Embassy Of Foreign Artists, Genève, Suisse.

Sasha Pierce

Sasha Pierce received an MFA from the University of Waterloo, an Honours BA in Studio Art from the University of Guelph and currently lives and works in Toronto. Recent exhibitions include: Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina (2014); Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto (2013); Mercer Union, Toronto (2013); The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2012). In 2009 Pierce was awarded honourable mention in the Eleventh Annual RBC Canadian Painting Competition. Pierce is this years recipient of the Laura Ciruls Painting Award administered by the Ontario Arts Foundation. Her work has been reviewed in Canadian Art, Border Crossings, The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star. Sasha Pierce is represented by Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto.

Beth Stuart

Beth Stuart is a Canadian artist based in Hamilton, ON. She holds a graduate degree from the University of Guelph, and an undergraduate degree from Concordia (Montreal). Notable recent presentations include a solo project at the Esker Foundation in Calgary Alberta, The Painting Project curated by Louise Dery at UQAM and More than Two: Let it Make Itself, curated by Micah Lexier at the Power Plant. In 2010 she was shortlisted for the RBC Painting Prize and in 2011 she received an honorable mention. She is represented by Battat Contemporary in Montreal.

Jim Verburg

Jim Verburg is a Dutch/Canadian based in Toronto. Solo exhibitions include One and Two, at Mois de la Photo à Montréal (2011), and Afterimage at Galerie Nicolas Robert (2014, Montréal). Recently, he’s been a part of the group exhibitions More Than Two (Let It Make Itself), curated by Micah Lexier at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (2013, Toronto), Primeiro Estudo: Sobre Amor, curated by Bernardo Mosqueira at Luciana Caravello (2014, Rio de Janeiro) and Far Away So Close, curated by Kimberly Phillips at Access Gallery (2014, Vancouver). His film For a Relationship won the 2008 Jury Prize for the Best Canadian Short Film at Inside Out Film Festival, and was nominated for the Iris Prize (UK). He has held residencies at the National Film Board of Canada (Montréal), Gallery 44 (Toronto), and The Banff Centre (Alberta). His book O/ Divided/Defined, Weights, Measures, and Emotional Geometry, was awarded the Dazibao Prize (2013, Montréal) and was recently shortlisted for Best Printed Publication at the Gala des Arts Visual (2014, Montréal). Work from the publication was featured by Art Metropole at Art Basel Miami (2013). This spring, widmertheodoridis (Zurich) presented a solo booth of his work at VOLTA NY (2015, New York City).

Katie Bethune-Leamen

Katie Bethune-Leamen works in installation, sculpture, video and drawing. She received a BFA from Concordia University (Montreal) and an MFA from the University of Guelph. She has exhibited across Canada, in Iceland, Japan, France, Australia, the USA, the Netherlands, England, Australia, and other countries. Recent solo exhibitions include Shiny Object Person (Art Gallery of Ontario). Recent residencies include Fogo Island Arts (Fogo Island, NL), and SIM (Reykjavik, IS), with ones upcoming at the Illulissat Art Museum (Ilulissat, GD), and The American Museum of Natural History (New York, NY). In 2012 Richard Rhodes, editor of Canadian Art magazine, listed her as one of the “Top 3 of 2012.” She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards. Her writing has appeared in Canadian Art, C Magazine, Border Crossings and others.

Roula Partheniou

Roula Partheniou received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Guelph in 2001 and currently lives and works in Toronto. She has exhibited throughout Canada and internationally, with recent exhibitions at MKG127 in Toronto (Canada); The Power Plant in Toronto (Canada); Plug In ICA in Winnipeg (Canada); Museum of Bat Yam (Israel); AHVA Gallery, Vancouver (Canada) and MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts (USA). Her work is held in numerous private collections, in the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives and in the corporate and institutional collections of Munich Re, Bank of Montreal, TD Bank and The University of Toronto. She is represented by MKG127, Toronto Canada.

Mitch Robertson

Mitch Robertson is a conceptually based artist using photography, sculpture, the internet, installations, print making and drawing to create work that considers the intertwined paths of religion and superstition with globalization and consumerism. With over sixty exhibitions since 1998, Robertson has shown regularly across Canada and New Zealand as well as in the USA, Switzerland, N. Ireland, England, Germany, Scotland and Australia in public, artist run and commercial galleries. His work is in the collections of private, corporate and public galleries & institutions across Canada. He is represented by Birch Contemporary in Toronto.

Shaan Syed

Shaan Syed graduated in 2006 from Goldsmiths College (London UK). He has held solo exhibitions at Ana Cristea Gallery, New York; Birch Libralato, Toronto; Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin and PlugIn ICA, Winnipeg. Group exhibitions include Jerwood Space, London; Bloomberg Space, London; La Salles de Bains, Lyon; S1 Artspace, Sheffield UK; and Mercer Union, Toronto. Syed is a recent recipient of The Elephant Trust Grant (UK) and The Pollock Krasner Foundation grant for painters (USA). His work can be found in collections including the Doris McCarthy Gallery (University of Toronto), Helabank (Berlin), Royal Bank of Canada (Toronto), Saatchi Collection (London), TD Canada Trust (Toronto), UBS Art Collection (London), and the University of London UK. He will be included in the upcoming Thames and Hudson publication, 100 Painters of Tomorrow due for publishing Fall 2014. Shaan Syed is represented by Birch Contemporary (Toronto) and Galerie Michael Janssen (Berlin).

Micah Adams

Originally from Nova Scotia, Micah Adams received his BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, (Halifax). In 2008 he began a three-year residency at Harbourfront Centre’s Metal/Jewellery studio (Toronto). He is currently based in Philadelphia, PA, and is represented by MKG 127 (Toronto). Adams collects and reassembles objects to create new meaning and new possibilities, engaging a playful balance between humour and formal issues; size and perception of scale; longevity versus ephemerality; and how these relationships inform the value of work.

Kristiina Lahde

Kristiina Lahde is an artist from Toronto, Canada. She received her BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in 1999. Lahde’s work is in the collection of the Canada Council Art Bank and she is represented by MKG127, Toronto. She was recently longlisted for the Sobey Art Award. Criss-Cross is a series of new works that Lahde created during her recent residency at Open Studio. Using familiar measuring tapes and setsquares that have been embossed into white paper, Lahde has created a range of low relief patterns and effects. The series incorporates layered geometric patterns as well as intricate masses of spirals and zigzags. The work focuses on the form of an object without its function. A text by Bill Clarke accompanies the exhibition.

Suzie Smith

Suzie Smith is an interdisciplinary artist from Winnipeg, Canada. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University (2004) and a Master of Fine Arts from The Glasgow School of Art (2011). With a focus on printmaking, she makes art that looks at issues surrounding transformation, representation and the process of making. The work included in Smith’s Lines Not Straight is a series of lithographic prints of paper sculptures playing with the idea of transformation. The process for creating the work is indicated in the title of each work; for example, Circle Imitating Square was created by folding an image of a circle into an image of a square. Through deconstructing and reconstructing, Smith attempts to reveal a new truth, perspective, or double meaning. The work focuses on simple forms, shapes and patterns and highlights the breaks, bends and folds that create them. A text by Jenny Western accompanies the exhibition.

Alexei Vella

Alexei Vella (b. Tal-Pietà, Malta, 1983) is an interdisciplinary artist and illustrator based in Toronto. He received a Bachelor of Applied Arts in Interpretive Illustration from Sheridan College, receiving multiple awards and scholarships. After graduation he went on to pursue a freelance career in illustration and design, becoming noticed for his signature style. This recognition gave him the opportunity to exhibit in many shows and garner many professional awards. In the Spring of 2011 Alexei completed his MFA through OCAD University’s Interdisciplinary Master’s in Art, Media & Design program.

Mark Crofton Bell

Mark Crofton Bell (Toronto, ON) graduated with an AOCA from the Ontario College of Art and Design, and an MFA from the Chelsea College of Art and Design (London, UK). He has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad, has received numerous grants and awards and has participated in a variety of artist residencies. The process of transforming photography into painting is one of Bell’s primary concerns. He collects images from a variety of sources, which function as a kind of notebook of personal observation and become source material for Bell’s paintings. The subject of these images is often fragmented or fleeting, a decidedly odd perspective of the urban world, absences and interruptions of otherwise ordinary scenes. These photographs act as a starting point for his work and what begins as copying soon becomes interpretation. Eventually the photograph is abandoned altogether as the artist tries to resolve the work in terms of what each composition requires.

To those of us who are not printmakers, the world of print appears as a rarified practice filled with obscure terminology and complex systems performed on technology from a different era. To the outsider this perception can make it difficult to find inroads to the medium. The Visiting Artist Program at Open Studio was the bridge that gave me the opportunity not just to enter this world, but to participate in it fully.
– Mark Crofton Bell, Visiting Artist 2011-12

Catherine Lane

Catherine Lane (Toronto, ON) completed her BFA and MFA at York and has exhibited widely at venues in Canada and abroad. Through the use of drawing-based installation, Lane’s current studio practice focuses on the idea of the multiplicity of fragmented storytelling, where connections and conclusions are not definitive, but where the focus is instead placed on the numerous possibilities of what the story can be. Two-dimensional and three-dimensional surfaces are used as a base for ink and watercolour drawings, which depict the characters and the more action-oriented or fantastical elements of the narrative. These stories are both non-linear and wordless. Ideally, this form of storytelling serves as an exploratory narrative, where the viewer/reader analyzes the given images, actively discovering and piecing together their own story.

The Open Studio residency is one that is very unique in that it allows artists without printmaking backgrounds to experiment and complete a print-based project with the studio’s technical assistance. I had a great experience working with Open Studio and truly feel lucky to have had such an opportunity. – Catherine Lane, Visiting Artist 2011-12

Tom Ngo

After receiving his Master’s of Architecture at Carleton University, Tom Ngo began to explore architectural representation in the field of art. Tom has since been working as a mixed media artist and is currently represented by LE Gallery in the city of Toronto. Concurrently, Tom produces designs and concepts for the esteemed office of Moriyama & Teshima. Keeping current with architectural practice helps inform the art that Tom creates — melding it with his work to shape a critical outlook on contemporary art and architecture. Ngo’s work employs absurdity and nonsense as a means of questioning the logic of building design.

The residency was extremely balanced in terms of allowing one to explore, provided the necessary funding for the creation of the work and did a great job promoting and producing the support materials. The result was a very professional exhibition and body of work and I would recommend this program to anyone interested in exploring printmaking as Open Studio truly is one of the premiere facilities for printmaking in Canada. – Tom Ngo, Visiting Artist 2011-12

Derek Sullivan

Derek Sullivan is a Toronto-based artist. Recent solo exhibitions include Albatross Omnibus at The Power Plant, Toronto and Young Americans at KIOSK in Ghent, Belgium (both 2011), and his work is included in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. His collaboration with Gareth Long, The Illustrated Dictionary of Received Ideas, has been performed at numerous venues including PS.1, Queens, NY; Art Metropole, Toronto; Artexte, Montréal; and Wiels, Brussels. Sullivan was recently short-listed for the 2012 Sobey Art Award.

Caitlin Erskine-Smith

Born in Toronto, Caitlin Erskine-Smith has studied art and design in Europe, South America and at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Building on these experiences of intercultural dialogue and divergence, she is particularly interested in the use of the spoken and written word and the way in which intended and communicated meaning can be estranged. Focusing in textiles, her work incorporates traditional techniques to consider modern conflicts of identity, language, and change. She has exhibited in numerous juried exhibitions including Unity and Diversity, at the Cheongju International Craft Biennale, Korea, at Nuit Blanche and Luminato in Toronto, and at Nocturne, in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Meredith Setser

Meredith Setser is a printmaker, textile artist and assistant professor of printmaking at the Herron School of Art and Design (Indianapolis). She studied at Edinboro University (Pennsylvania) and Indiana University (IUPUI campus) for her undergraduate studies, earning a BFA in 1997. She attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, completing her MFA in 2004. Meredith has taught printmaking courses as an adjunct instructor at both the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Milwaukee School of Art and Design. She has exhibited widely, including the Qijiang International Print Exhibition (China), the 12th Annual Washington Printmaker’s Small Print Exhibition (Washington, DC),Folly, a solo exhibition at Basile Gallery (Indianapolis) and Perform/Install III at the South Bend Museum of Art (Indiana). Meredith has also given several workshops and demonstrations in felt making across the United States.

Jennie Suddick

Jennie Suddick is a multi-disciplinary artist. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, The United States, Germany and Italy. She received both a BFA and Advanced Visual Studies Certificate from The Ontario College of Art and Design, where she was the recipient of multiple awards. She received a Masters of Fine Art at York University. Her work, created in print, photography and sculpture, deals with issues of Canadian identity, cryptozoology, museological display, and hyper reality. Recently, she has shown at Board of Directors, Blackwood Gallery’s Drop Out 2009 Nuit Blanche exhibition, The Gladstone Hotel’s upArt and participated in Hallwalls’ Artists and Models: Stimulus in Buffalo, New York. She received the Award of Excellence at the 2009 Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition.

The ability to work alongside practicing printmakers working in both traditional formats of the medium, as well as those with experimental practices, provided the unique opportunity to participate in a developing dialogue around contemporary print media, which further informed the choices I make within my own practice. In my opinion, Open Studio’s members and staff currently play an integral role in these discussions, both locally as well as internationally, as exemplified in their presentation of the Printopolis symposium in fall 2010. I found all of the members of the community that I had the pleasure to interact with during my residency period offered interesting perspectives and practices during this exciting time for printmaking. The support for my project was abundant, with the staff being very accommodating to my questions and needs, resulting in me getting a firm understanding of how to get the most from my time there. 
- Jennie Suddick, Visiting Artist 2011

Joy Walker

Joy Walker is an artist originally from Montreal, living and working in Toronto. She studied textile design at OCAD and for over 20 years, has designed and produced printed textiles for retailers and design consultants throughout Canada and the U.S. Her artwork reflects her interest in pattern, repetition, geometrics and the ephemeral using a variety of methods including printing, photography, drawing, stitching and cutting. Joy’s work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions and is included in private and public collections. She is also the programmer of *QueenSpecific, a window exhibition space on Queen St. West in Toronto displaying site-specific art installations. She is represented by MKG127 gallery in Toronto.

The Visiting Artist Program at Open Studio gave me the opportunity to realize a large-scale screenprint project that would have been impossible to carry out in my own studio. The generous access to the printing facilities at OS and the technical assistance provided by Nadine Bariteau were crucial to the success of this project. The VA program culminates in an exhibition and an artist publication to accompany it, which is a perfect way to complete the residency experience.
 – Joy Walker, Visiting Artist 2011

Bill Burns

Bill Burns‘ work about animals and civil society has been shown and published widely including solo projects at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, England (2008); KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (2007); the Wellcome Trust in London, England (2002); and 303 Gallery, New York (1994) and group shows at the Kunsthallen Nikolaj in Copenhagen, Denmark (2009); Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Lausanne, Switzerland (2006); Museum of Modern Art in New York (2005-06); the Seoul Museum of Art in Korea (2002); and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1995). He has published numerous books including When Pain Strikes, a scholarly anthology, (Burns, Busby and Sawchuk, editors and contributors, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1999); Bird Radio, (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Koenig and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Cologne and Berlin, 2007) and The Guide to the Flora and Fauna Information Station: 0.800.0FAUNA0FLORA, (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England, 2008. In 2009 he received the Danish International Visiting Artist Award from the Danish Arts Agency in Copenhagen.

Kate McQuillen

Kate McQuillen is a Chicago-based artist working mainly in print and installation. Her work deals with the idea of telecommunications as an invisible landscape in our midst, one that sometimes comes to life. McQuillen received an MFA in Visual Art from York University in 2009. She has exhibited in Toronto, Montréal, Boston, and Chicago.

Over the past year, I have participated in four artist residencies. Of them all, I felt that Open Studio’s was, overall, the best considered and most efficiently run. They provide what is most needed by artists: studio space and equipment, media exposure (through both an exhibit and printed matter), funding, and the support of a community. I had an excellent experience there, and will recommend it highly to anyone.
– Kate McQuillen, Visiting Artist 2010

Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay

Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay is a Montréal-born artist, diarist and bon-vivant. Since 2000 Nemerofsky Ramsay’s work has involved video, performance and print works as creative vehicles for examining the singing voice and the history of song, the rendering of love and emotion into words, and the impact of popular culture on identity. His work has been exhibited in festivals and galleries across Canada, Europe and East Asia and has won prizes at film and media art festivals in Canada, Germany, Poland and Portugal. His work is part of numerous private collections as well as the collection of the National Gallery of Canada.

Jill at Open Studio was especially generous helping mastermind the best ways to produce my bookwork during my residency. She she brought her wisdom and experience to the planning of the project, and had thought of every possibility and every detail. I was perfectly matched with the hard-working and skillful Nadine Bariteau. We had lots of fun experimenting with different colours. Every new print felt like a celebration. – Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Visiting Artist 2009

Greg Staats

Greg Staats (b. Ohsweken, ON) is a photographer and video artist whose works combine language, mnemonics and the natural world. Staats draws upon a traditional Mohawk restorative aesthetic that defines the multiplicity of relationships inherent within the condolence ceremony. Staats works in gathering images that have formed as an archive and also draws on a personal and familial archive or recordings, papers, diaries and recently found images. His video works are contemplative and require the viewer adapt the rhythms of the natural world while conceptually defining patterns of renewal to counter loss of language and subsequent worldview. He has had solo exhibitions at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Walter Phillips Gallery, Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery, Mercer Union and Gallery TPW. Group exhibitions include: the Ottawa Art Gallery, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, the National Gallery of Canada and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. Staats is the recipient of the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography. Recently, he has been Faculty for two Aboriginal Visual Arts Thematic Residencies: Archive Restored (2009) and Towards Language (2010) at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Staats has an upcoming solo exhibition in 2011 at the McMaster Museum of Art.

Tine Bech

Tine Bech is a Danish artist based in London, England, who works in installation, sound, sculpture and drawing. She has exhibited widely including exhibitions in Denmark, Germany, Norway, Russia, the UK and the United States, and she was previously artist in residence at Artscape’s Gibraltar Point International Artist Residency on Toronto Island. She is currently on a Research Sabbatical from the University for the Creative Arts (Farnham, England). Bech’s work explores the membrane between the body and the world. During her residency at Open Studio, Bech worked with the technical collaboration of artist Shawn Reynar to translate her drawings—which utilize rain as a technique for mark making—into lithographs.

My residency and exhibition at Open Studio were fantastic opportunities to experiment with new techniques, translating my thinking and drawings into beautiful prints. Shawn, my brilliant printer, allowed me to be in doubt and at full speed at the same time. It was a fruitful collaboration between my print innocence and his expertise – “very experimental” as I overheard him explaining to someone. I really enjoyed being at Open Studio – the people and the big open space. Artists need more of your kind! – Tine Bech, Visiting Artist 2008

Kai Chan

Kai Chan is a textile artist living and working in Toronto. He has exhibited across Canada, the United States, Japan, Australia and Europe. He has received numerous grants from the Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council and awards including the Jean A. Chalmers National Crafts Award (1998), and the Saidye Bronfman Award for Excellence in the Fine Crafts (2002). He is represented by David Kaye Gallery in Toronto, Galerie Elena Lee in Montréal and Galerie Ra in Amsterdam.

The Open Studio residence has open a huge window in my creativity which I didn’t know I have. – Kai Chan, Visiting Artist 2009

Suzanne Nacha

Toronto artist Suzanne Nacha works “in and against” painting. Her work makes connections between a human experience of the landscape that surrounds us and the earth as a physical body, endlessly evolving. She has exhibited widely in Toronto and across Canada, and internationally in Germany and the United States. With undergraduate degrees in Geology and Fine art and an MFA from York University, Nacha has taught in the Fine Art departments of OCAD, Sheridan/ UTM and York University, and for the past fifteen years has worked in the mining industry. During her residency at Open Studio, Nacha worked with the technical collaboration of artist Daryl Vocat, to create screenprinted monoprints, using imagery abstracted from her paintings of underground spaces such as catacombs and tunnels.

An invitation to participate in the Visiting Artist Program at Open Studio provided me the opportunity to rethink my image making process. Unfamiliar with sceenprinting, I was surprised to find that the planning and preparation I so often associated with the medium, could as easily give way to such unexpected results. As a painter involved in creating imagery that hovers between representation and abstraction, I saw this experimental process as an invaluable way for me to rid my work of ‘unnecessary visual baggage.’ Moving forward, I hope to utilize the generation of mono-screenprints as part of an ongoing ‘testing ground’ for image making. – Suzanne Nacha, Visiting Artist 2008

Endi Poskovic

Endi Poskovic (b. Sarajevo, Bosnia, 1969) is a graduate of Sarajevo School of Music (Primary Music Diploma 1982-86), Sarajevo School of Applied Arts (Diploma in Fine Arts 1983-86), University of Sarajevo Academy of Fine Arts (BFA 1986-90), and State University of New York at Buffalo (MFA 1991-93). He has represented the US in virtually all major international print biennials and triennials and is the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships and prizes and his works are in numerous public collections in the US and abroad. He has been on faculty at universities across the US, has lectured extensively as a visiting artist throughout the US and abroad, and is currently tenured Associate Professor of Art at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor School of Art and Design and CREES Faculty Associate in the University of Michigan’s Center for Russian and East European Studies.

The visiting artist residency brought me back to the core of making prints and helped me make a transition between my past life in California and the new challenges and opportunities in my new place. This was realized through the extraordinary support of artists and staff at the Open Studio and it came to full fruition in my new series of lithographic prints. I am profoundly grateful for the opportunity. – Endi Poskovic, Visiting Artist 2009

Michel Daigneault

Michel Daigneault is a Montreal-born artist working primarily in painting who completed a B.A. in Fine Arts at Concordia University and an M.A. in Art History at the University of Montréal. He has exhibited in a number of solo and group shows across Canada, in the United States and France. His work is represented in many public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Musée national des beaux arts du Québec, Joliette Museum and the Canada Council Art Bank. As a professor, Daigneault joined York University’s Visual Arts Department in 2002. During his residency at Open Studio with the technical collaboration of artist Daryl Vocat, Daigneault worked in the area of screenprinting to create what he calls a “visual utopia” where abstract vocabularies become figurative. His interest lies in creating new meaning through his combination of symbols and imagery. A text by Matthew Brower accompanied the exhibition.

I was invited to do a residency at Open Studio as a mid-career artist. … I was able to explore new ideas, to develop them while discussing technical issues with the [collaborative artist] and to participate in the creative atmosphere of the studio. – Michel Daigneault, Visiting Artist 2008

David Merritt

David Merritt works in the areas of drawing and installation. His work has been exhibited in venues across Canada as well as abroad, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Textile Museum of Canada and TENT CBK, Rotterdam. He is represented by Jessica Bradley Art and Projects, Toronto. During his residency at Open Studio with the technical collaboration of artist Emma Nishimura, Merritt worked in the area of intaglio to create delicate works on Japanese paper that explore and exhaust his inventory of popular song titles from the last 100 years. A text by David Poolman accompanied the exhibition.

Adopting drypoint offered a degree of intensity and lightness to the work that I could not have achieved with the drawing approaches with which I was previously accustomed. Perhaps most important though in such adventures are the unanticipated outcomes. Having blindly ventured into the strange world of deliberately scratching metal surfaces to produce images has since lead me to a new drawing project, one using the vocabulary of incised marks on large sheets of lead as an end in itself. – David Merritt, Visiting Artist 2008

Jaclyn Shoub

Jacyln Shoub has a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and BA and BSc from the University of Guelph. Her work has been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally including: Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa, ON; Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery, Owen Sound, ON; and the Art Gallery of Mississauga, Mississauga, ON. Shoub is represented by Wynick/Tuck Gallery, Toronto and Gallery Page and Strange, Halifax. Shoub’s previous work, a hybrid of photography and painting, thematically encompasses the physical and emotional transition between the urban and rural landscape usually incorporating photo-based imagery of industrial parks, highways and sub-divisions. Continuing to explore these issues, Shoub worked collaboratively during her residency with artist Jill Graham to produce a series of large-scale photo-based lithographs featuring the landscape and architectural elements common to airports. Shoub considers this engineered landscape as a transitory zone where passengers surrender autonomy, leading to a heightened sense of anxiety and uncertainty. A text by Greg Staats accompanied the exhibition.

My experience at Open Studio was totally positive and I feel it is not only a great addition to the Toronto visual art community, but a necessary one. It affords artists the opportunity to work in new ways, with facilities that would not normally be available to us. The Visiting Artist Program ended with an exhibition of the work and artis’ts talk, which was also a very positive and valuable experience for me. – Jaclyn Shoub, Visiting Artist 2008

Robert Truszkowski

Robert Truszkowski has an MFA from Concordia University and BFA from Queen’s University. His work has been included in solo and group exhibitions including: Galerie d’art St. Ambroise, Montreal, QC; John Sommers Gallery, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM; and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, NS. Truszkowski works in a variety of media including traditional and digital print media, painting, photography and video and was a finalist in the 2003 New Canadian Painting Competition. During his residency, Truszkowski with the assistance of artist Eric Mathew produced intaglio prints that continued his exploration of issues related to the production, dissemination and consumption of information. A text by Eric Mathew accompanied the exhibition.

Open Studio is synonymous with contemporary printmaking both in Canada and internationally, so to be part of its programming is a considerable feather in my cap. … I was made to feel genuinely supported upon my arrival in a way that eased any trepidation about working in a new environment, with unfamiliar people; the kind of welcome and transition that allowed me to get right to work. The palpable sense of community is what drew me to printmaking as a student in the first place, and Open Studio has certainly managed to capture this feeling and get it right. – Robert Truszkowski, Visiting Artist 2008

Diyan Achjadi

In Diyan Achjadi’s work, she looks at representations of militarism and violence in children’s literature, toys and news media. Starting a web project in 2002 entitled Once Upon A Time through to a project called See Girl, the works use images of little girls navigating within candy-pink landscapes that are punctuated with symbols suggestive of apocalyptic doom – gas masks, rifles and fluffy mushroom clouds. During her Visiting Artist residency at Open Studio, she created a large-scale, screenprinted wallpaper project with a continued apocalyptic theme.

The Visiting Artist Program at Open Studio is unique in Canada – some places provide access to printmaking facilities without necessarily also providing the technical assistance, expertise, exhibition opportunity, and publication. The combination of all these things is crucial, as it allows one to develop the work with a specific professional and spatial context in mind.

Through the exhibition, artist talk, and publication, the Program also gave me the opportunity to present my work to a new audience, crucial to the ongoing development of any artist. Additionally, some of the prints completed at this residency have now been exhibited in Vancouver, Atlanta, and Philadelphia. Since my time at Open Studio, I have completed a resi- dency at the Banff Centre, working primarily in silkscreen on a new body of work that continues some of the ideas that I touched upon [at Open Studio]. – Diyan Achjadi, Visiting Artist 2007

Michael Caines

Michael Caines has participated in numerous residencies including the Banff Centre for the Arts in 2005, and is trained in expressive arts, which he has taught at the Flemming College in Haliburton, Ontario. Caines has been creating a book-length drawing project over the last year entitled Purgastoria, which explores Caines’ childhood realization of mortality and a desire to more fully explore his relationship to death. The artist personally experienced a series of illnesses that led him to consider the fragility of his own body and inspired his interest in images of the demise and regeneration of the body. During his Visiting Artist residency at Open Studio, Caines created a sequence of screenprints as a limited edition book.

The residency was an excellent opportunity for the development of a new creative direction in my work, and a rare experience in that I had complete access to the excellent resources at the studio. – Michael Caines, Visiting Artist 2007

Karen Henderson

Karen Henderson received her MFA from the University of Victoria and has exhibited widely in national and international venues including Optica in Montreal (2005) and Hallswalls in Buffalo, New York (2002). Henderson creates work using photography, film and video. In her work there is a kind of condensing of the way that time is registered visually. She has worked with the filmic process where the image or moment changes from one frame to the next and is seen as a time-based experience where it starts, progresses and stops. In her work at Open Studio, she has experimented with multiple photographs using lithography on clear acrylic to create a sense of passing time in a simultaneous way.

Taking part in the process of printmaking, and all the decisions that involves (even the first decision of which print medium was most appropriate to use) was a huge learning experience for me.

My practise has always had a relationship with sameness amongst difference, and seeing all the prints and the uniqueness of each one, even though they came form the exact same source, was an unexpected and welcome element of the project. – Karen Henderson, Visiting Artist 2007

Scott Waters

Scott Waters‘ artwork focuses on the often contradictory rites and rituals of violent masculinity. Primarily, these have been painting projects that could be considered akin to Social Realism: with an autobiographical starting point, he uses his personal experience in military service to depict scenes and events which embrace the violent, the deviant and the homosocial all with the end point of investigating manifestations of community. At Open Studio, Waters produced a series in intaglio with chine collé, which refers to the histories of Social Realism and war art while emphasizing a more self-critical role of the artist through the depiction of fights and drunkenness.

Throughout the duration of my residency I was certainly granted the time, resources and support to develop and execute my intaglio-based project. For myself, however, the more important result was the opportunity to step out of my comfort zone as an artist. It was the disconnection from the familiar that was the most valuable aspect of the experience. – Scott Waters, Visiting Artist 2007

Nadine Bariteau

Nadine Bariteau is a multi-media artist based in Montreal currently residing in Toronto whose work embodies a multi-media approach using mixed media video, printmaking and sculpture techniques. During her residency at Open Studio, Nadine produced a series of screenprints that are glued and moulded directly onto wooden surfaces creating a three-dimensional installation. Her images derive from video images captured in the subway system and, as exhibition brochure writer Bernard Lamarche describes, reflect on the experience of the passage of time and space in a daily routine that most of us take for granted.

Shary Boyle

Shary Boyle is a multi-media artist based in Toronto who works concurrently in drawing, painting, sculpture and performance. During her residency at Open Studio, Boyle produced a series of etchings with aquatint that continue her ongoing investigations surrounding issues of identity, mythology, sexuality and dysfunction.

Ben Reeves

Ben Reeves is a Vancouver-based artist. His large-scale series of lithographs entitled Unrecognised Heads of Unrecognised States produced during his residency at Open Studio are an extension of his signature rigorous graphite contour drawings of dense patterns, which focus on the physical surface of paintings.