New & Emerging

Celan Bouillet 

Celan Bouillet is a mixed media painter and installation artist whose work investigates ideas of home and our attempt to find our place in transient and surreal natural environments. Bouillet’s mixed media pieces are highly detailed and manipulate scale along with pattern to create complex narratives.

Sena Cleave

Working across text, sculpture, and photographic image making, Sena Cleave explores the slippage that occurs when ideas and materials travel between cultural sites. They pilfer cultural matter from everyday life and repurpose it to address issues of legibility and hybridity in diasporic Japanese experiences. The works titled while remaining a detail it fills the whole picture and as if direct vision oriented its language wrongly are part of a series of paper weavings that explores both the idea and the material force of tension. The process of weaving (of creating tension between warp and weft) disrupts the source materials so that elements that once registered as background details may be reframed or brought forward. Among photographs of the artist’s face and images sourced from archival issues of Japanese women’s magazines, the weavings contain passages from Miriam Silverberg’s essay The Modern Girl as Militant and Izumi Suzuki’s short story Night Picnic.

Kyla Gilbert

Kyla Gilbert’s process is influenced by her background in puppetry and environmental science, and an interest in abstract painting. She is curious about applying the language of one discipline to another and seeing the ways in which juxtapositions can be created (sculpture through a performer’s lens, painting through a sculptor’s lens). Her method of creation, material assemblage, reflects this collaging of different knowledge forms. Gilbert approaches her process as a site for improvisation that results in the creation of objects full of discrepancy, juxtaposition, awkwardness, and joy.

Jake Kimble

Grow Up is a series about perspective, and how artist Jake Kimble chooses to view his own histories of being a kid, two-spirited, alive. By excavating a variety of personal archives, including notes from therapy, credit card receipts, and family photos, the artist pieces together a non-linear narrative investigating the act of processing. By layering text directly onto photos, it allows these seemingly familiar adages to take on different meanings depending on the viewer’s state of mind, their true nature being elusive and transfigurative. For Kimble, this act of reflection is a personal ceremony. It reflects his maxim that if something is mentionable, it is manageable: a strategy for coexisting with one’s truths and traumas. Doing so in a way that has humour and pathos not only makes it easier, but hopefully extends an invitation for others to do so as well.

Jacky Lo

Jacky Lo’s silk and paper-based works focus on exploring the production and materiality of silk, linking it to skills, lost histories, and migration of the artist’s family. Like a Moth to a Flame (飞蛾扑火) highlights the complexity of silk as a natural fibre and its extraction and production of the silkworm. Considering the history of silk with Lo’s own, the silk embroidery reimagines the forgotten experiences and skills of Lo’s great-grandmother who was a master embroiderer in China but had to let go of her practice due to the Cultural Revolution. Slow Burn and Mùrè I (Mulberry I, 木热 I) are handmade papers from mulberry leaves that silkworms consume. The burnt marks on the paper emulates the bite marks and immolation of silkworm, representing the lost skill of the artist’s great-grandmother.

Marcie Rohr

The use of layers in artist Marcie Rohr’s work is her way of mimicking transformation in life, as it occurs in unwavering repetition and variety. Occurring incrementally, moment to moment, seemingly invisible, or in the form of sweeping, dramatic change, it seems that existence itself can be summarized as an endless layering of transformations. Rohr’s artistic practice has evolved into a meditation on this continual progression. She paints in acrylics, translucent and fast drying, and their layers slowly build up, sometimes over years. Rohr introduces oil paint, purposely confusing her sense of time, forcing the progression of the work to slow down, until forms that feel right to her emerge. These compositions often hang in a balance between geographical and figurative. The oneness of body and land is a place that Rohr muses on continually, and most of her works are explorations of this intersection.