Students’ Association /
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1.6.23
/ 1.27.23
AUArts SA has served students for over 35 years, ever since our founding in 1985 by the dynamic Suzanne Agopsowicz as ACASA's first President. Through the years, we've undergone a few name changes (ACADSA in 1995, AUArts SA in 2019) but our commitment to representing and supporting AUArts students has never wavered.
This showcase is a special opportunity for you to get to know our team and see a glimpse of the passions and interests that drive us. Each piece on display has been created or curated by one of our team members to represent their unique contribution to the AUArts SA community. We hope you enjoy getting to know us a little better and we look forward to continuing to serve the AUArts student body.
Gurman Sahota - Executive Director
Gurman Sahota/ I'll get to it / monkscloth, acrylic yarn / 2022 to present
What are intentions without action? Is procrastination or motivation the problem? I'll get to it on Monday, I swear.
Morgan Calenso – Vice President of External Affairs
Morgan Calenso / My Baby, My Blob
Stoneware, Glaze, Cone, 10 / 2022
carolina vasquez-lazo - Communications
carolina vasquez-lazo / extremely exciting enjoyable times, matte print / 2022
a little piece of my heart <3
Juli Song - VP Student Life
Juli Song/ Foolish Tiger and the Witty Magpies/ 2021
Within the “A Bedtime Inheritance” series Juli works to depict the Korean folk tales passed down by her mother when she was a sleepless child. Juli’s works are thematically connected through her expression of her Korean heritage and lived experience with race, identity, and her family history with war and immigration. In this narrative Foolish Tiger and the Witty Magpies she pulls from a popular theme in Korean folk art (Minhwa) during the Joseon Dynasty (1400-1800) where symbols of “Kkachi” and “Horangi” (Magpie and Tiger) are used as allegorical satire of Korean hierarchical structures. Juli sees these bedtime stories as a way to reconnect with Korean identity and learn culture from oral teachings and familial bonding. For her, the immigrant experience is defined by the language and culture one has at home which formulates a separate identity from one outside. These stories thus bridge the gap between home life and public life.
Mike Hooves - Office Coordinator
Mike Hooves/ Prairie Queer: Barb / Crayola Markers / 2019
Prairie Queer is a series of intimate marker portraits depicting queer people residing in Calgary. Subjects were sketched onsite in a space of their choosing, with final larger-scale images being completed by Mike during their two month residency at Arts Commons. Subjects are depicted in a gently confrontational and playfully celebratory manner. Prairie Queer was created using low-grade water-based markers, challenging it's perception as a valid art medium.
Leia Guo - Show + Sale Coordinator
Leia Guo / AUArts Fantasy Trading Cards / 2022
Who says artists can't save the world? This photo-illustration series brings the magic of art school to life by elevating artists in different AUArts majors to magical DnD style adventure heroes! Each of the five trading cards features a current student at AUArts and comes with an additional info card that highlights a few of their class specialties. This project was a collaboration between myself and five of my friends to inspire first and second years, have some fun, and as we inch closer to graduation, to remember why we all choose to be artists: because art is magical!
Robyn Mah – Communications
Robyn Mah
Sat Like a Rock
rock and stencil ink, 2023
Robyn Mah is a prairie based visual artist living and working in Mohkinstsis. She holds a BFA in painting from the Alberta University of the Arts. She is an emerging interdisciplinary artist using painting, sculpture, and design to question the perceived notions of identity, by isolating precarity, form and colour through abstraction. They are interested in pushing materials into a role that includes the artist’s hand and charged with its own sense of material history and context. This runs parallel to their tattoo practice, using similar methods to create designs that mark trusting bodies— helping them validate their chosen identities.
Portia Scabar – Executive Committee President
Portia Scabar / untitled (you don't have the time) Glass, Steel / 2022.
Catching a moment of time, a breeze. Here for a fraction of a second, the nothing. Dissipated into thin air unable to be held.
Sam Rollo – Program Manager
Sam Rollo / EAT, silkscreen collage on newsprint / 2021
Sam is a recent graduate of the Alberta University of the Arts (class of 2022) with a BFA in Print Media and is focused on developing collaborative, inclusive programming that encourages connection and community building. Their artistic practice is based in anti-authoritarianism and community building. They primarily work with collage and printmaking tactics found in agit-prop (agitational propaganda) to represent “business as usual” as dystopian while conveying a push for an alternative condition. They are a firm believer in knowledge and skill sharing, peer to peer support, and providing mentorship opportunities whenever possible.
Janira Moncayo - Graphic Designer
Reeny Koh - Administrative Assistant
Quynn Covey - VP Academic Affairs
All these portraits of us also done by Mike!HEAR/D Team
Levin Ifko – hear/d residency
Levin Ifko / Meditations for the Art Gallery sticker series / 2022
Meditations for the Art Gallery is a series of text-based sticker designs that invites the viewer to meditate upon possible futures for contemporary art spaces. These designs were commissioned by the Mitchell Art Gallery as part of their 5th birthday celebration, where visitors were invited to speculate and dream about the future they wish to see for the MAG, and by extension, contemporary art spaces as we know them. These stickers are a limited edition of 1055 (350 prints per design). You can pick them up for free at the MAG, located in MacEwan University on Treaty 6 Territory in Edmonton AB.
Elise Findlay - hear/d residency
Elise Lavallee Findlay / Finding Our Place / Embroidery thread and found objects (trash) on birchbark / 2020-2022
This piece is an exploration of Pointe au Baril, on Georgian Bay in Ontario, where my family cottage and history have deep roots. It is both an exploration of place, our history there, the positive and negative, of tensions, and a record of movement through the waterways and islands that make this place so special.
