2019 Collider artists

Ashley Bedet

In 2015 Ashley Bedet came back to Calgary where she was born, after studying art in some manner or another in Vancouver (Emily Carr), Halifax (NSCAD University) and Amsterdam (Gerrit Rietveld). Since Bedet graduated from NSCAD University in 2014, she has participated in the 2017 Alberta Biennial, in 2018 she was commissioned by cREative Realm to make work responding to the summer construction along 17th Avenue with students from Western Canada Highschool. Bedet is the product of many very different worlds reproducing, meeting difference, and then reproducing again. She is to a braid what string is to thread.

Noel Bégin

Noel Bégin is a practical observationalist within the field of contemporary art. Working spatially with sculpture, digital and analogue projection, and performance, his immersive work both implicates and activates the viewer to make empathetic decisions.  Noel has exhibited and/or curated installation, performance, and media art with the 2013 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art, Decidedly Jazz Danceworks, Particle + Wave Festival, Art Gallery of Calgary, the Glenbow Museum, Banff Centre, the Mountain Standard Time Performance Festival, the ArtCity Festival and Calgary area Artist-Run Centres including EMMEDIA.  Recently, Noel has provided cinematography and technical assistance to artists Jin-me Yoon, Gary Burns, Nicole Kelly Westman, and Mark Clintberg, among others. He received AMAAS’s Spirit of Helen award in 2017 and has served on the board and committees of numerous artist-run centres in Calgary.

Ryan Bourne

Ryan Bourne is a Calgary-based multi-disciplinary musician, composer, performer, artist and designer whose solo and collaborative work explores experimental, avant-garde and psychedelic approaches to pop songwriting. Ryan works with themes of spiritual transcendence, vulnerability, transformation, mortality, isolation, and fluidity. His visual work further explores these feeling subjects via vibrantly coloured loosely figurative and abstract works in painting, large scale charcoal drawing, and digital and analog collage, and installation. In the past decade he has released or collaborated on 9 records, 2 EPs (including solo RB, Chad Van Gaalen, Marlaena Moore, Ghostkeeper, Holgans, Sleepkit, and Devonian Gardens) and 2 art books (both with visual artist Kiarra Albina) and toured Canada, Europe and the US. He currently performs with Chad Van Gaalen, Ghostkeeper, Lab Coast and Marlaena Moore, and under his name. Recent work has included photographic colour treatments for Kaleidoscope Eyes, a collaboration with Rebecca Ried on the fabrication of a scale kaleidoscope for the cREative Realm project.

Ali Ceaser & Cody Cox

The mirror that reflects a mauve ceramic faucet or a long, dimly lit, brick hallway are the spaces that inform the works of duo Ali Ceaser and Cody Cox. The Alberta University of the Arts (formerly Alberta College of Art and Design) is the space in which these two met during their respective undergraduate degrees. Ali focuses on the sociopolitical ongoings within an intimate setting while Cody studies the very personal effects of the artist in witness to architectural design. Dealing with the inherent intimacy of a human in their surroundings, the artists collide perspectives to study psychogeographical effects. Intense reflections on these happenings, certain moments in time, or feelings that cannot be translated into words are the core subject matter of their works. So together the two combine the figurative and abstract characteristics of not just the space but the individual within, in hopes of describing the impossible. Some of the makers and thinkers that influence their work are Kim Dorland, Dana Schutz, Fred Sandback and Gaston Bachelard. Using materials such as, but not limited to: charcoal, paint, pastel and mixed media the two create works that internally discuss the relationship of the human and their surroundings.

Cîpayak ᒌᐸᕀ

Cîpayak ᒌᐸᕀ is the multimedia collaboration between Shane Ghostkeeper and Sarah Houle. Their projects continue to evolve through art, sound and visuals. Cîpayak ᒌᐸᕀ delves into the many layers of contemporary Indigenous storytelling through interactive multidisciplinary concepts.

Bill Gardner

Bill Gardner spent his early years with his many siblings on a small farm north of Airdrie, Alberta. Bill has an older brother named Jim. In Canada’s centennial year Jim was invited to travel across the country to Montreal for Expo ‘67 with their Uncle Frank. Bill did not get to go. He has been disappointed ever since.

Bill graduated from the Alberta College of Art and Design in the 1980s, worked in the film and theatre industry and is currently employed by the Alberta University of the Arts as a Technician. He maintains a studio practice in the laundry room of his house in Bridgeland and is collected by museums around the globe. That would be Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museums. He has not been on David Letterman.

Guy Gardner

Guy Gardner trained as an Architect and recently completed a Masters of Environmental Design thesis exploring the intersections of Art and Architecture through the lens of digital craft. Guy completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture at the Alberta College of Art and Design and is a Journeyman Welder. He has collaborated on a variety of public and community art projects in Calgary, both as a designer and a fabricator.

Michel Gignac

Michel Gignac works with everything from scavenged toilet paper rolls to coded interactive electronics. His work often explores concepts of consumerism, surrealist absurdity and ownership. These interests have manifested in gallery installations, snow carvings, public art, as well as set design and fabrication for theatre and film. Since graduating with Distinction from the Bachelor of Fine Arts program at the Alberta College of Art and Design, he has exhibited nationally and internationally. Last winter as part of (S)hiver Arts Festival, Michel was in Dawson City, Yukon to present his newest installation Going Somewhere.

Michel often seeks collaborative opportunities to encourage new directions that could otherwise never have been conceived. He has worked with Alia Shahab on Ghost Carwash for Wreck City’s Penguin Carwash, an interactive electronic installation. Together with Alia and Eric Heitmann, Michel formed an award-winning snow sculpture team that has travelled to Whitehorse, Thunder Bay and is heading to Yellowknife in February 2020. Michel’s most recent collaborations have been with Whitehorse-based artist Gorellaume to create Through the Thought Process and Shared Effort, two three-dimensional large-scale murals in Whitehorse’s NorthLight Innovation building and Yukon College’s Cold Climate Innovation space.

When he is not making his own art, he can often be found developing art workshops for youth and adults. For more information about the artist please visit: michelgignac.ca

Rocio Graham

Rocio Graham calls Calgary home. She emigrated to Canada from Mexico in 2002. She studied art at Emily Carr University and at the Alberta University of the Arts where she obtained a Bachelor of Design in Photography in 2017. Her work is at the intersections of art and science. Her art practice is influenced by her cultural heritage, experiences as a woman and trauma survivor, interest in life cycles, and knowledge of botany. She explores the landscape from a body engagement perspective, where labour, mysticism, science, and temporality merge. As a student, Rocio was selected as a finalist in the Womankind photographers award in Australia. Since graduation, she has been nominated for the BMO 1st Art Invitational Competition and has received various scholarships and grants. Rocio co-founded Blind Spot, a yearly photo-based art exhibition during the Exposure Festival. She is currently a peer residency coordinator for the AUArts Hear/d art residency, a visual arts instructor for the YMCA, and a director on the Elephant Artist Relief Society board of directors. She strives to build community and support networks for artists; a commitment that is exemplified by the garden studio that she created at the Women’s Centre of Calgary. Rocio is also represented by Christine Klaassen Gallery.

Brandon Hearty

Brandon Hearty is an Alberta-born, multidisciplinary artist currently living and working in Calgary. Primarily a painter, his studio practice has grown to include printmaking, installation, and augmented reality as channels for exploring human sociality and our impulse to escape.

Hearty’s work is comprised of a growing series of reflections on the blurry line between memory and history. His subject matter highlights the power of allegorical and historical narratives, resulting in work which asserts the value of memory and nostalgia. These views of the past are presented through a haze of paint and layered futuristic augmentations resulting in a fusion of mediums that reframes the past through the lens of the present technology. The latent invitation to consider our identities (and the mythologies connected to them) through a broader scope of existence is at the core of Hearty's practice.

Jennifer Ireland

Jennifer Ireland is a multimedia artist working to develop different ways of looking and relating to land and nature through the questioning of traditional epistemological approaches. Ireland strives to make work that is mindful of the situation, context, access, and impact – both environmental and social – in our current state of the Anthropocene. This environmental ethic is found in her work through specific materials and methods which are often light, sustainable and provisional.

Ireland’s multi-media, research-based practice ranges from drawing, photography, video, and sculpture to site-sensitive installation and performance. She is primarily concerned with the abstraction of boundaries and how this relates to issues of embodiment, landscape, and place. Each artwork is a proposition that operates simultaneously as suggestions and possibilities for way-finding in the Anthropocene.

She holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Calgary, studied drawing and sculpture at Alberta College of Art + Design, and recently graduated from the 2018 Masters of Applied Arts at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Jennifer Ireland has shown works across Alberta and British Columbia and has works held in private collections.

Kriss Janik

Through the use of digitally archived images that have been forgotten since their capture, Kriss Janik explores the digital revolution and its potential effects on memory. By processing photographs and videos sourced from his personal digital archive, images are created to form a space for discussion, contemplation, and speculation, encouraging the viewer to question the capacities of forgotten imagery and to become cognizant of the technologies we entrust with more and more data every day.

Kriss Janik lives and works in Calgary, Canada. He has recently exhibited his work at Pushmi Pullyu (Toronto), SPG (Toronto), and Studio C (Calgary). He holds an MFA from York University (2017) and a BFA from the University of Calgary (2014). Janik was the recipient of the SSHRC scholarship (2015), and was an artist in residence at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia (2014). Janik currently works as an Art Coordinator at Prospect Human Services.

Joe Kelly

Joe Kelly is a Newfoundland-born and Calgary-based filmmaker and media artist with a large body of media art, encompassing film, video, installation and performance. He’s exhibited installations and films in galleries and at festivals all over the world and guest lecturing at post-secondary schools across North America. Studying film and video at the Quickdraw Animation Society and the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers. Joe works primarily with film and video and has completed and screened many films on super 8, 16 and 35mm formats.

Highly active in the Calgary media arts community, Joe has participated in mentorship projects with EMMEDIA Production Society and making documentaries and educational videos for non-profit organizations like Vecova, and the Calgary Drop-In Centre.

Dan Cardinal McCartney

Dan Cardinal McCartney is an interdisciplinary artist from Fort McMurray, Alberta. He is a proud mix of Mikisew Cree, Suline Dene, and Metis descent on his maternal side with deep roots in Fort Chipewyan. Graduating in Drawing from the Alberta College of Art + Design in 2016, he is currently based in Calgary. Dan traverses media to excavate cultural diaspora and gender dysphoria. His mixed media collage works echo northern Albertan homeless structures and homes. Self-help and medical books from questionable sources from the 1970s and onwards are structurally supported by alcohol packaging.

Dan’s reconnection to his maternal family exposes his struggle to adhere to gender roles. He reconciles his familial expectations to now enter motherhood despite identifying as a man. Through film and performance, he renders himself vulnerable before an audience; he is physically as well as emotionally naked. Dan redirects the psychological tropes employed in horror films to exacerbate the tension in public as a transgender, Indigenous person. Dan explores the binary through stereotypes of masculinity and re-evaluating stereotypes of race. Gender dysphoria combined with cultural diaspora leaves gashes to either remain open or to be scabbed over in time.

Joanne MacDonald

Joanne MacDonald is a self-taught mixed media artist who grew up in rural Quebec. She moved to Calgary in 1980 and connected deeply to this city through college, career, marriage, family, and friendship. Joanne has now lived in Calgary much longer than in Quebec and values being an active part of Calgary’s wonderful and vibrant arts community. Always an artist at heart, Joanne further developed her skills at Alberta College of Art and Design, and at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology by taking continuing education courses.

Inspired by the delicate balance of nature and relationships, Joanne’s works almost exclusively with found, natural and recycled elements. Joanne is an intuitive artist using the resources to inform as she cuts, grinds, assembles, and welds raw materials. Her artwork like a mirror contrasts the balance and imperfection of life. Pensive and introspective, Joanne’s sculptures, often kinetic, allude to individuals and their relationships creating an emotional dialogue between art and viewer and inviting them to interact with the pieces.

Joanne has always viewed her artwork as a maquette and welcomes the challenge of larger public and commission pieces. These past few years have resulted in a few exciting commissions – one located in a new condominium in East Village and 2 more recently from the City of Calgary. “MARQUEE” which is located at Cerebral Palsy Association in Alberta, completed in the spring of 2016b with artist Lane Shordee. And recently a solo piece “UNLOCK” an interactive installation located on the 100 block of 17th Avenue S. Calgary. Her work has been seen at many Calgary galleries including DaDe Art & Design Lab, Stride Gallery, Triangle Art Gallery, and Ruberto Ostberg Gallery where she is represented.

Tammy McDonald

Tammy McDonald is an interdisciplinary artist, whose works include textile, installation and performance.  Her practice explores themes related to the use of and the memories contained within cloth and cultural spaces.  

McDonald was born in 1975 in St. John, New Brunswick.  She considers herself to be a cultural mutt as she was raised and has lived across Canada. Her national roots are English, Scottish, Irish, French and First Nations. She has a wonderful wife and two children who support and influence her practice. She graduated with distinction from what is now referred to as the Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary with her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2017.

Jeremy Pavka

Jeremy Pavka (b. 1987, Lethbridge Alberta) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Calgary, Alberta and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Media Arts + Digital Technologies from the Alberta College of Art + Design (2011). Pavka’s practice uses analog and digital technologies combined with comedic tropes to create laborious renditions of the everyday.

Recent exhibitions include: Hamilton Artist Inc., Hamilton, Canada (2018) Jarvis Hall Gallery, Calgary, Canada (2017), Platform Gallery, Edmonton, Canada (2017), Stride Gallery, Calgary, Canada (2016), Unitt Pitt, Vancouver, Canada (2016), Sometimes Art Space, Havana, Cuba (2015), and 8eleven Gallery, Toronto, Canada (2015). He has participated in numerous residencies including Still Alive, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff, Canada (2016), Common Opulence, Demmitt, Canada (2015), and the Corbin Union Residency, Corbin, Canada (2013-2017).

Mireille Perron

Mireille Perron is a visual artist, critical writer, and educator. She was born in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal, QC. Since 1989, she lives and works in Moh-kíns-tsis/Calgary, AB. Perron is the founder of the Laboratory of Feminist Pataphysics (2000), a social experiment that masquerades as works of art/events. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, Europe, and the United States. Most recent examples of the range of her work includes the solo exhibition, The Anatomy of a Glass Menagerie: Altaglass, Nickle Galleries, Calgary, 2019, and the essay, Four Revolutionary Moves: Dancing with Craft, co-authored with Amy Gogarty, Studio: Craft and Design in Canada, 2019. Perron is Professor Emerita at the Alberta University of the Arts.

Leah Petrucci

Leah graduated with distinction from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2010 earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a major in Glass. Leah was raised in Alberta on an acreage just outside of Calgary. All through her upbringing family was an important influence in her life. Her strong sense of family has been a huge inspiration throughout her art with a particular emphasis on childhood memories.

Currently, Leah rents studio space at various companies in Calgary and surrounding cities as well as works out of her home-based studio. Leah’s work explores ideas of identity and how it relates to childhood and family.  She plays with pattern and colour to evoke memories of toys, games, and a childlike sense of fun, space and freedom. Her art often seeks the balance between youthful whimsy and the deep roots of family and place.

Leah and her husband have five wonderful children who are the highlight of their life! The beautiful chaos and creativity of her everyday life consistently find their way into her work.

Shea Proulx

Shea Proulx spent her twenties going to forest-raves, living with a lot of strange people, and becoming over-educated at Emily Carr and UBC. Immediately after graduating with an MFA she discovered that she was totally pregnant. Juggling motherhood and artistic pursuits proved easier in Alberta, with the help of her mother, a fellow writer who really "gets" it. She's self-published two books, and her most recent book, Alice at Naptime, was published by Renegade Arts and Entertainment. Her work is a nerdy trip, where memories and observations co-mingle to form sweet psychedelic spaces, and visual narratives steal the show.

Rebecca Reid

Rebecca Reid, creative alias Willow Herzog, is a Calgary based visual artist and tarot reader who specializes in installation, set design, projections and large scale creative environments. She has worked with AGA, Art Commons, Sled Island, Welcome to the West, Offbeat Figure Drawing, Frog Fest, Calgary Outsider Art, Femme Wave, People of the Wild Mountain Arts Collective, Blank Page Studio and numerous other grassroots projects. Rebecca also works consistently as a set designer for Market Collective, creating immersive stage environments and installation art. When not working on sets, props, and stages she is a Kindergarten and children’s art teacher. Her creative work often uses up-cycled and reclaimed items and draws inspiration from the sublime and ethereal realms. While placemaking and set design are her main practice, Rebecca is also a painter, writer, and sculptor who frequently enjoys creating with resin, stained glass, and organic materials. She is inspired by neon, nature, light, astrology, the '70s and sexuality. She would describe her work as being resourceful and full of esoteric textures infused with intuitive impulses.

Alberta Rose Williams/Ingnuk

Born and raised in Treaty 7 Territory near to the Bearspaw, Chiniki, and Wesley bands of the Nakoda nation, Alberta finds passion in art, food, politics, and social issues. These interests are expressed through artwork as well as engagement with community organizations and events. As an Inuvialuit person growing up outside of her traditional territory, she has often felt a sense of displacement; but found a connection to her culture through her late mother and traditional practices. Alberta graduated from ACAD in the spring of 2016 with a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art (with distinction), majoring in painting and then spent 18 months at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity as a prepatorial practicum in the Walter Phillips Gallery. During her time at ACAD, she won the painting 3rd-year award, an Indspire Bursary, acted as president of the Aboriginal student’s club, and was a member of Next Up. At the Banff Centre, Alberta was a part of the Indigenous working group on campus and participated in the Inherent Right to Self Governance Leadership program. Currently, she is based in Calgary and is a southern liaison for the Inuit Art Foundation, studio assistant, and artist.

Alia Shahab

Alia Shahab is a Calgary born visual artist and collaborator creating sculpture and installation work situated in a sense of play and physical exploration. Working with electronics and new media, she is interested in invoking interaction between people and isolated ephemeral experiences drawn from nature. She is also interested in the static sculptural form which commands physical movement of a body in space to grasp its entirety; Through this medium she explores magnified elements of reality entwined with imagined sensibilities. 

Alia is motivated by immersion in site specific environments that incite community interaction and influence. The creative opportunities that she has engaged in since graduating from the Alberta University of Arts in 2012 have clearly shaped this. She has created work for 3 Wreck City projects which encourage experimental art in alternative spaces, has participated in Sacahqa’s Artist Residency in Peru - leading to installations in the northern highlands of the Amazon and the Sacred Valley of the Andean mountains, has explored abandoned spaces in Ottawa and Montreal through Ayatana’s research residency, ‘Vestiges’, and has built installations for Beaker Head, Sled Island, Frog Festival, The New Gallery, and Avalanche Gallery. In the Winter, she enjoys carving snow sculptures with Eric Heitmann and Michel Gignac who have exhibited together in Whitehorse and Thunder Bay. Alia is also passionate about sharing her creative energy with youth and has enjoyed working as a Community Arts Facilitator with Antyx Community Arts since 2011 to coordinate and facilitate many large scale collaborative arts projects in Calgary. 

Lane Shordee

Lane is a scavenger artist based in Calgary, Alberta. Drawing from construction waste and items found by happenstance, he builds elegant sculptures and installations that both challenge and indulge our relationships with the things we throw away. Lane mines the immediate surplus of materials available, and, informed by his environment, reframe it into cohesive structures, allowing its presumed worth to be re-evaluated. In the same way, the term “scavenger” traditionally holds a derogatory connotation, through a new perspective, it can become something of considerable merit and nobility. His process is of an organic and sometimes comical nature that toys with semiotics, functional aesthetics, and happy coincidence – shapes and forms are left to chance or whimsy. It is this playful flexibility that grants each piece an inherent naivety and warm charm. Works begin as sketched schematics that are fleshed out and assembled from objects on hand, objects he can construct, and objects he must seek out. He maintains a steady cache of lost and found objects to be adjudicated and reworked. Embracing shift and impermanence, Lane abides by the notion that we live in a cultural mash-up of ideas rooted to all parts of history – as, with memory, each idea becomes new with every attempt to access and re-create it. As such, materials are engaged in a dialogue-of-bricolage, and a collaboration ensues, informed by space, ecology, and the history of the engaged article. Recovered items are respected and regarded as a natural urban resource, and thus reclaimed as artful by-products of by-products – in effect, dissemination of our individual ideas of consumption and waste.

Teresa Tam

Teresa Tam is a practicing artist based in Calgary, graduating from Alberta University of the Arts (formerly Alberta College of Arts + Design) in 2014. Teresa’s practice utilizes spaces and experiences that are familiar, and then alter them into something a bit foreign through re-interpreting and re-creating. Her projects are developed to include and emphasize visitor interactions. She specializes in digital platforms, functional installations, DIY practical objects, and body-based exchanges. Some places she has exhibited include Stride Gallery, Particle + Wave Festival, WRECK CITY, The New Gallery, IKG LIVE and Femme Wave Festival.

Morgan Taylor

Morgan Taylor is a Toronto-born painter, working and living in Calgary. In Morgan’s portrait paintings, she celebrates the seductiveness of colour and the playfulness of gender expression. Through her work, she hopes to open an imaginative space of play to explore her relationships with gender norms, identity, and queer subjectivities. Morgan earned her MFA from the University of Calgary in 2017 and her BFA from Queen’s University in 2015. Since graduating, Morgan has worked as an instructor for the Art Department at the University of Calgary and Wildflower Arts Centre. Currently, she works full-time as an Art Program Coordinator for Prospect Human Services.

Tommi Watts

Tommi Watts combines elements of performance, drawing and installation to inform a social and economic commentary, self-reflexive of a ‘Studio Brat’. A Bachelor of Fine Art graduate from the Alberta University of the Arts (formerly Alberta College of Art + Design), Tommi’s practice leverages her studio space as a body of work in flux; exhibiting part aphoristic recording and part assemblage, to ultimately critique the subjective conceptions and vulnerabilities of a Studio Brat.