MFA graduating exhibition 2024

Shapes and shadows

an intersection of identities

May 27 - June 28, 2024

featured artists

A photo of the graduating MFA class, from left to right Dani Crosby, Nasim Makaremi, Shirley Moorhouse, and Leslie Sweder
Dani Crosby's work

dani crosby

“I am a studio artist, illustrator, arts educator, and community engaged project builder with over 20 years of experience. In this work, I am playing with light-responsive illusion-making. This method helps me externalize and share the process of seeing and developing connections between seemingly disconnected or even conflicting elements. It helps me find the threads weaving between the seen and unseen.

I use illusion-making as a method to explore a joyous/challenging integrated whole within various themes related to loved experiences and identity. In these illusions, the colour cancellation represents one extreme, and the colour absorption represents another. Revealing and concealing. The white or amber light illuminated the place in between, the place we can find on the edge of the coin, between all and nothing.”

@danicrosbyart

danicrosbyillustration@gmail.com

Nasim Makaremi's work

Nasim makaremi

“My work aims to challenge gender discrimination and censorship of women’s bodies, using animal symbols to critique the censorship of the body and sexuality. In my process, I am suddenly challenged by the meaning of land. As an immigrant, my Iranian-inspired themes and ideas find new meaning in the new land I live on. By exploring my life in Iran, I mix my understanding of that place with my new home, questioning if I am lost. As an immigrant woman, air planes changed my life; my childhood, mom, and mother tongue were left behind. Homesickness altered how bread tasted, and long distances became digital friendships. Despite denying these changes, I check Iran’s news daily, unable to sever my connection to both places I call home. I constantly ask myself what has significantly impacted my life: my experience as a woman in Iran or my journey as an immigrant artist in Canada.

@nasim.m_art

makaremi.nasim@gmail.com

Shirley Moorhouse's work

Shirley moorhouse

“I am a multimedia artist. My maternal Grandmother, Anana, named me E-Ye-!, translated from Inuktitut, meaning Eyes.

Before creating any work be it wall hanging, painting, poetry or a garden, I mindfully offer the Multiverse prayers of thankfulness, peace, wholeness and healing. Through my art I attempt to open dialogue on issues of colonisation, decolonisation, reconciliation and environmental stewardship.

In creating my art I strive for inner transformation and transpersonal changes with hopes that it reflects and is softly absorbed by you.

In Labradors’ brief summer you’ll find me coaxing flowers and shrubs to bloom in my “Fro-Zen” garden. During the long winter I am in my studio, dreaming of gardening”

shirleymoorhouse896@gmail.com

leslie sweder

“I am interested in learning more about the nature of my relationship to the land I am intrinsically connected with, the subtle and explicit relations between us, grounding my process in an intimate exploration of entangles systems. This work challenges destructive binaries such as nature/culture, self/other while exploring themes surrounding perception, correspondence, landscape and nature, gesture, rhythm, and embodiment. The works in Slow Dancing and Strange Strangers document and abstract collaboration with a mated beaver pair, the three of us actively (and temporarily) interfering with the flow of a wetland stream and the lifeforms in that stream - the beavers, through the construction of their dam, and I by making simple formal dance postures with my feet in the stream nearby. The list of participants does not end there, for the expressions of every life form in that stream are also intimately involved in this unique and ephemeral dance.”

@lesliesweder

llsweder@gmail.com