Art Toronto 2021

Sonny Assu

Sonny Assu (Ligwilda’xw of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nations) has been recognized for his mashups of Indigenous iconography and popular culture. Through a variety of mediums including sculpture, painting, prints, large-scale installations and interventions Assu’s work maintains a profound connection to past traditions while speaking to pertinent issues of our time.

Assu’s work is included in numerous major public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Museum of Anthropology (Vancouver), and the Vancouver Art Gallery. In 2021, Assu received the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, awarded every two years by the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana – the home of one of the finest collections of Indigenous art in the world.

Bobbie Burgers

Bobbie Burgers is interested in the process of decay, transformation, and metamorphosis in nature. With a distinct style that merges abstraction with representation in increasing degrees, her work brings together instinctive compositions while revealing her precise powers of observation. Remarkable for their compositional rhythms, bold coloration, and sweeping gestural brushstrokes, Burgers’ paintings bring alive the fundamental quest to express something personal, subjective and emotive, in a poetic, abstract way.

Gathie Falk

Gathie Falk’s practice meticulously transforms objects of everyday experience into extraordinary things. Working in a variety of media that includes performance art, sculpture, ceramics, painting and drawing, Falk has produced works that feel surreal and dreamlike, reinventing clothing, fruit, plants, shoes, or baseball caps into objects of much greater significance. Although these objects are relatable in their familiarity, it is the personal symbols they carry – not the universal – that are of interest to Falk. Her practice has been aligned with the traditions of Surrealism, Funk, Fluxus, and Pop Art, but the influences are rarely direct. Indeed, Falk is most comfortable when poised on the edge of contradictions.

Shawn Hunt

Shawn Hunt is a Heiltsuk artist born in Waglisla (Bella Bella), British Columbia. Hunt’s practice is directly informed by his Scottish, French and First Nations background and the visual culture and traditions that accompany it. He works with the traditional Northwest Coast design principle, known as formline, to create abstract, surreal, and sculptural artworks based on ancestral Heiltsuk Cosmology that often reference contemporary aboriginal life. Hunt is always seeking to push the boundaries of the art form, often combining non-traditional ideas with innovative uses of materials and motifs in his work. 

Gwenessa Lam

Gwenessa Lam is a visual artist and educator. Her artwork stems from interests in perception and the compression of time and memory within images. Gwenessa received her BFA from the University of British Columbia and MFA from New York University. She has taught at New York University, the University of British Columbia, and the Alberta University of the Arts. She has attended residencies at Skowhegan, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Banff Centre.   Her work has been exhibited at the Bronx Museum of Art and the Queens Museum of Art in New York.  Gwenessa lives and works in Vancouver, BC and is currently Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Khan Lee

Khan Lee was born in Seoul, Korea. He studied architecture at Hong-Ik University, before immigrating to Canada to study fine art at Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design. He works in performance, media, sculpture and drawing. His practice involves experimentation with form and process in order to express inherent relationships between material and immaterial content. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Lee lives and works in Vancouver, BC.

Erin McSavaney

Angela Teng

Angela Teng’s work reconsiders what is traditionally required to make a painting, and then suggests otherwise by renegotiating how a picture can be made. Her painting practice utilizes a laboured dedication to the process of craft through abstraction and studio-based exploration of materials. Her crocheted acrylic ‘paint-paintings’ manipulate ways of paint handling, while her works on hand-made crocheted cotton/linen surfaces celebrate the application of thick oil paint with a brush. Her patterns generate an optical buzz created from the marbling of paint, wobbly form, and through experimenting and observing the optical interaction of colours one upon another.

Etienne Zack

Etienne Zack is one of today’s artists who are truly pushing the envelope in terms of painting concept; his process is entirely based on reading and taking notes – no visual source material is used. His process of making paintings relates to notions concerning the various ways history itself is manipulated and “worked out”. Zack’s work often focuses on the context in which artworks are produced and exhibited, and the physical and conceptual tools that go into creating them: the studio, art gallery, painter’s materials, and historical and theoretical reference works. Both poetic and playful, Zack’s painting prompts us to re-examine the everyday world around us.