New & Emerging

Ghislain Brown-Kossi

Ghislain Brown-Kossi describes the series titled Symbols as representing a universal language that everyone can understand or derive a unique meaning from. His paintings depict languages using plaster casts upon bright pops of color. The artist is also expressing a return to ancestral values through the use of symbols as our earliest form of writing. For Brown-Kossi, symbols are at the heart of his imaginative life as they open the mind to the unknown and the infinite. They encompass this recurring theme, ranging from European undeciphered writing systems and Egyptian hieroglyphics to modern advertising, comics, technology, and all of the interconnectedness historic and current communication channels inform and provide. Each symbol used has many meanings in various parts of the world, allowing for the resulting interpretation to be based on the viewer’s background and personal experience.

Aakansha Ghosh

Aakansha Ghosh is a visual artist who works across mediums using found everyday objects and building materials. Her research attempts to understand the complexity associated with notions of defining, sustaining, and accepting a place as a geographical identity. Her works further explore the implications of these identities in relation to how a place becomes home. Interested in sites and objects, her work weaves an understanding of place and home that navigate their presence through each other. She earned a BVA from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India (2018) and an MFA from Simon Fraser University, Canada. Ghosh currently lives and works as a guest on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

Khim Hipol

Khim Hipol intends to create a work with photography to speak about the land he lives on. North Vancouver, the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, has been his home since migrating from the Philippines in 2015. ‘I am here, you are here’, is a project that highlights Hipol’s appreciation of the new land he is residing on. It makes him look at this land’s history, story, and purpose. Even more, ‘I am here, you are here’, showcases the beauty of North Vancouver, but it also upholds values and context that could be studied, which aims to acknowledge and deepen viewers’ understanding of the land.

Emily Kirsch

‘The Blobs’ is a series of interdisciplinary artworks created by Vancouver island emerging artist Emily Kirsch. Through a process of visual exploration Kirsch intuitively collects colours, shapes, and textures that are incorporated into their distinct visual language. This constant searching for visual additions is driven by the love and need for learning and play. From this base, ‘The Blobs’ are born from a catalyst of acrylic pours translated into print and textile mediums. In all forms, ‘The Blobs’ beckon us closer.

Malina Sintnicolaas

Malina Sintnicolaas considers her sculptural work to be manifestations, transmutations, or “petrifications” of emotions into a physical form. Her practice is questioning the ways in which one can represent emotions such as depression, trauma, and anxiety with a physical form and in what ways can one induce empathy for an object even if it is alien or abstract. Working with texture, material properties, and form, her sculptures are bodily, visceral, and drive to evoke feeling to create an empathic landscape that will suggest an understanding for states of mind which are difficult to be described verbally.

Dion Smith-Dokkie

Generated with seafoam videos, self-recordings, techno-chromatic effects, ‘Lucious Arc I’ acts as a florid world-boundary: enveloping, transporting Smith-Dokkie’s body and local world in a manifold surface, matrix. Mediation and translation are key operations in Smith-Dokkie’s practice: they’ve been working with seafoam since arriving in Vancouver. Some flowers open when the wind contacts them— the foam was like an anemone field. Then the foam expressed novel states: clouds, mirrors, reefs, oceans: interfacing, mutating.