Summer Institute Exhibition

Taking the architectural designer/writer Elsa Maki’s idea of stitching as a hybrid strategy, The Eating Room is a multidisciplinary art project that examines Hallyu (the Korean Wave), a global proliferation of K-culture, to explore how Korean diasporic communities consume media from their homeland. This is a new work in development since 2025.

Through material and digital archives, including denim and performance art, The Eating Room is a diasporic inquiry into the complexities of immigration, belonging and hybridity. A large textile piece evokes a camouflage-patterned topographic landscape made of second-hand denim, referencing the ceasefire at the 38th parallel, as well as fried chicken, a byproduct of the American occupation in Korea. Meanwhile, a multi-channel video installation features a montage of performances for the camera alongside found footage of Koreans eating fried chicken, inspired by Mukbang, a popular “K-food” livestream genre in which influencers consume large quantities of junk food.

The two works in this exhibition explore ways of thinking through making, in which the image is generated primarily through material encounter rather than predetermined in advance. Using reverse painting on transparent Plexiglas, pixelated figures, architectural fragments, gestural marks, scraping, and transparency accumulate and interfere with one another. One work allows a painted, pixelated animal character to emerge within a dense field of painterly marks; the other returns to imagery from an earlier body of work based on the Musée du Louvre, treating my own previous painting as material that can be fragmented and re-encountered. Both developed through attending and responding to what appeared in the process rather than working toward a predetermined composition.

Computer Culture was brand new in 1980. This booklet cover is for an exhibition at Harbourfront organized by OCA’s Photo-Electric Arts program. It’s a detail to be included in my collage of archival source materials representing OCA’s Photo-Electric Arts program in 1978-1982. Ahead of its time, Photo-Electric Arts – the precursor to Integrated Media in the Faculty of Art - supported experimental robotics, proto-internet transmission art, interactive performance and collage using fax machines, SSTV and early sonic synths. Live-to-live collaboration via phone lines fostered interactive communities and artist-run exchanges, across Canada, New York, Europe and the Pacific Rim.

During her residency at the historic A-frame home in Ameliasburgh, Ontario, Canadian visual artist Erin Finley began a series of expressive ink portraits of iconic poet Al Purdy. This legendary writer's retreat was famously saved from destruction by literary titans Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Leonard Cohen. Immersed in the space where Purdy composed "Wilderness Gothic," Erin captured his rugged likeness before concluding the project during the Summer Institute residency at OCAD U. Her evocative sketches pay homage to Purdy’s enduring legacy and will be published in an upcoming anthology.

In the Summer Institute 2026, I composed a group of eight large drawings that visualise those worldly forces that we think we see: mayflies on their day of ecstasy, the fugue produced by ants as they enact their world, bullfrogs waking from long winter sleeps, and images of the smallest of creatures, hungry, geometric, and fluid.

We make lines to understand. We draw pictures and music, biology and physics. In this sense I view my studio, with all its knots and muddles, as a place for dreaming. When I draw, my hands glide from my shoulder through clouds to the water, marking shadows and intervals, spinning across surfaces that are not surfaces. I look, see, and speculate. The sky becomes legible, and I change.

With the support of the Faculty of Art’s 2026 Summer Institute and access to OCAD University’s Fabrication Studios, I have been able to continue my exploration of perceptual ambiguities that are at play in sculptural and installation-based artworks. My practice relies on the recuperation of discards collected from my surroundings. These provide specific material, design, fabrication, and use considerations, while informing "hands-on" experimentation and research that bring into perspective perceptual, historical, and aesthetic contexts. Thus, my project attempts to enlist the uncertainties inscribed in viewers’ interpretive approach to objects—encounters located around the cusp between the “known” and the unknown.

Memory in a Bottle is a participatory installation exploring how personal memories become part of a collective experience. The work draws on the familiar image of a message in a bottle. Separated from its sender, the message eventually surfaces in the life and imagination of a stranger, who receives it without knowing its full context. The recipient is left to imagine the person and the story behind the message, filling in what is missing through their own memories and experiences. In this way, the message no longer belongs entirely to the one who sent it.

During my time in the residency this summer I produced a series of seven large oil paintings that will be shown in a solo exhibition at the Durham Art Gallery in October. For the Summer Institute exhibition, I am sharing three studies produced alongside my paintings that will together form the set design for one of five vignettes. Each vignette reunites two people who are separated by time or circumstance, inflected by the harms of racial capitalism, to reimagine what might otherwise seem like impossible futures.

This summer, I continued work on An Archive of Rememory, an ongoing series I began in 2016 that explores memory, inheritance, and the stories that are passed from one generation to the next. Centered on the narratives surrounding the Japanese Canadian internment, the work considers what it might mean to package, preserve, and archive memory.

The series consists of hundreds of small bundled forms inspired by furoshiki, a traditional Japanese wrapping technique used to store, protect, and carry belongings. A furoshiki may wrap a gift or serve a practical purpose, but it also suggests care, preservation, and the act
of carrying something forward.

Colibrí, Colibrí, Colibrí is a smaller version of a large-scale, site-specific project that will be installed as part of an upcoming solo exhibition entitled Gusapo, take a seat, in January 2027 at Neutral Ground, Saskatchewan. By invoking the cardinal directions through visual images and sound, Gusapo, take a seat, intends to create a meditative/trance space composed of a large-scale floor work including a double headed crocodile paired with two half sun discs, hanging hummingbirds, large-scale textile meditative self-portraits and a recording of my daily sound meditation/trance.

There are places that seem to exist just beyond certainty. They appear in fragments: a solitary tree, a path through tall grass, reeds emerging from still water, a shoreline disappearing into fog. Familiar but difficult to locate, they feel less discovered than remembered, inherited, or imagined.

Soft Ground brings together a series of landscapes that occupy this uncertain territory. Beginning with photographs of ordinary places, the work follows a process of transformation that loosens the image from the specificity of documentation. The resulting scenes resist a fixed geography. They seem to belong to a place with its own internal logic, where repetition and variation suggest that each image is part of a larger, unfolding world.

In this work, I revisit the cultural and architectural heritage of Spomenik(s) – land-based monuments of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – my homeland and a country that no longer exists. The word spomenik in Serbo-Croatian language means a memorial monument. Emerging in the period from the 1950 to 1980 as the “new altars of the secular religion of socialism” and as the pinnacles of Yugoslavian modernist architecture, spomeniks stand as the embodiments of remembering the victims of the WW II and the courage of partisan soldiers who fought against fascism. They also symbolize the utopian spirit of brotherhood and unity that kept former Yugoslavia intact for almost fifty years.