01 - Main Space

Coming January 17

Other Horizons AUArts x SMFA Print and Textile Exchange facilitated by Jonathan Creese

02 - Artist Statement

Jessica Wu is an emerging artist. She was born in China and immigrated to Canada when she was 5 years old, and grew up in Calgary. After taking a printmaking course on a whim in her first year of university, she fell in love with the medium, and hasn’t looked back since. Now, she mainly works in silkscreen, lithography, and surface design on fabric. Her artistic practice focuses on themes of cultural and racial identity, memory, and sexuality. She marries printmaking, fabric dyeing, embroidery, drawing, and painting to explore how diaspora, tradition, and self-determination intersect. The individual must negotiate her relationship to the communities she belongs to and those outside her community, and this narrative is central to Jessica’s work. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Print Media from Alberta University of the Arts in May 2024, and completed a visual arts residency at Banff Centre of Arts and Creativity in June/July 2024.

Coming January 17

From Venezuela to Treaty 7 Territory by Daniela Szeoke

January 17 - February 2

01 - Exhibition Statement

Empty Lines is made up of three large canvas shrouds from my recent body of work. These pieces in particular present a more focused exploration capturing the relentless fatigue of daily existence within the mundane as an artist. They are a display of the lived body as I am able to understand and unveil it. The emptiness that this can create within our lines. I see the final work as the resting site of the process, reflecting what remains and what the materials have decided to present, evolving organically from my state of being at the time. It didn’t start with a clear intention, but rather, grew and transformed, feeding off my emotions and experiences within the process of making. Through the presence of meticulous thread, the hands of this work present an aspect of labour and utility. A further understanding of the process of making the work, and embodiments of maker, inflictor, and healer.

02 - Artist Statement

I am an interdisciplinary emerging artist who graduated with Honours in the Bachelor of Fine Arts Drawing Program from the Alberta University of the Arts. My work centres on my struggle to understand nor express the extensive experiences and trauma that my body carries daily. It examines how remnants of trauma materialise, communicate, and turn the body into a vessel and whether my art is capable of functioning as a surrogate vessel for these emotional weights, existing outside of paralysing communicative boundaries. These remnants contend with identity, purpose, femininity, queerness and chronic mental and physical illnesses within my human experience. My practice works towards creating a visual language for the physical and emotional sensations of psychogenic scars, fostering a community of understanding, not just from the viewers, but from the artist as well. I am interested in the matter of painting. Raw canvas has always been embedded in my understanding of rawness in the context of the body. The canvas, chosen partially for its ability to soak and stain while remaining durable, mirrors the body’s capacity to be moulded and marked. The colour remains as raw as the internal, evoking the sensations of blood, clay, and earth. Hands, symbols of both healing and harm, are stripped bare creating emotional visualisations of overwhelming touch, comforting and constraining, woven together echoing fibre practices and root systems, reflecting parts of a whole. The prints made through my body physically transfer bodily content onto the surface unconsciously, manifesting internal conflicts in the physical realm. These pieces of my practice come together to allow a processing and understanding of myself and my existence in the world.