LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Before there was a gallery here and a studio upstairs, these lands were hunting and harvesting grounds. Between today and pre-colonization, this campus has been farmland, a military base, and a jam factory.
Today we acknowledge and respect the lək̓ ʷəŋən peoples on whose territory the university stands, the Songhees, Esquimalt, and W̱ SÁNEĆ (Pauquachin, Tsartlip, Tsawout, Tseycum) peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day.
In making this acknowledgement, we commit to walk softly and mindfully on this land and work to uphold decolonization and Indigenous self-determination.
Top row (from left to right): Stephen Strutynski, Rebecca Sagert, Hayley Stangowitz, Delicia Jacobs, Kyra Kelpin, Timm Malm, Andre Gogol, Dr. Natasha Reid. Bottom row (from left to right): Jo Roueche, Cha-Cha Ledda, Liz Cheng, Genevieve Lisik, Marnie Augello.
We are students in the M.Ed. Art Education program. This summer, we participated in the Studio Inquiry B course, where we worked with reflective process-oriented studio practices, created a focused body of work, and contextualized our artwork within contemporary artistic and art education practices. In this second summer together, re-emergence became a uniting theme in our experiences in the program and the resulting artworks.
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Andre is a local photographer and art teacher at Parkland Secondary. Having spent much of his youth exploring the badlands of southern Alberta, he is fascinated by the deep history of these otherworldly landscapes. As part of his MEd capstone project, he has also been collaborating with the Royal Tyrrell Museum to produce images of fossils using the platinum palladium contact printing process. Andre hopes these images may inspire others to explore the landscapes that offer so much incredible history and understanding of life on Earth.
Andre Gogol
Genevieve Lisik
Geneviève’s work is a fascination with the medium of fabric, the process of sewing and binding things together. She explores who she is, what she wants to become and the infinite processes that can be used to get there. Driven by curiosity Geneviève’s recent work has been researching LGBTQ2S acceptance, discrimination and inclusion. She is inspired by the people who live their lives unafraid to be themselves in a world that is constantly trying to pull them down. In the hopes of celebrating these people, Geneviève has been exploring her own family’s story of becoming through fabric, colour and stories.
Arantxa (Cha-Cha) uses analog and digital collage techniques to rework off-cuts and ripped paper with found imagery. These new and unexpected combinations of textures and layers are a part of rediscovering her creative process. Her work explores restoring, revising, re-storying, and her eventual re-emergence as an artist-teacher.
Arantxa (Cha-Cha) Ledda
Stephen Strutynski
Not knowing is my comfort zone. Both my teaching and artistic process are driven by the learning discovered when playing in the unknown. My artwork visually represents my artistic process. My actions and gestures over time are recorded onto paper through my touch. The mediums I work with move and flow and I respond to their behaviour. My work has no defined outcome when I begin, I just begin. My process, the materials and the unknown all combine in a generative chaos. This results in work that responds to moments in real time, creating my own archive documenting the unknown becoming known.
I am an artist and teacher who grew up in the forests of BC. My work explores the places where built and natural spaces connect and intersect. I am inspired by empty lots and neglected spaces where plant and animal life adapts to an urban environment. I gather my sources by walking through Victoria, sketching, and taking photos.
I am using walking as a way to think about where I am, and how to bring eco-education into my teaching practice by drawing on my student’s lived experiences.
Hailey Stangowitz
Rebecca Sagert
This collection of small works in oil, watercolour and digital media come from a shared archive of family slides and photographs. While I am working with these images in the studio, they lead to unexpected conversations, collaborations and questions. Some have answers, others lead to further research, generate new directions or approach the same sources from a different lens. The photos have elements of place, time, family, social and personal identities. They allow me to re story the past in the present and imagine what will emerge in the future. I choose to work on a small scale to invite an experience that is both informal and intimate, allowing a closer look at the materials, forms and text that make up this collection.
I am an artist/educator who grew up on these beautiful Lekwungen and WSÁNEĆ territories. My work features gesture and expressive mark-marking. I am drawn to unselfconscious, fluid, spontaneous movements and how they interact with colour and texture. I seek freedom and fluidity in gestural mark-making as a means of feeling my way, finding my ground, and shedding too-small skins. Much of my current work explores asemic writing/marks – I am curious as to what becomes of highly stylized, meaning-laden marks when they are stripped of their assigned meaning. I’m inspired by the mark-making work of Cy Twombly and Julie Mehretu.
Jo Roueche