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4. [OCAD U artists showcase their works at Bau-Xi Gallery as part of the Career Launcher Exhibition!](/markdownify/node/4576)
July 9, 2026
# OCAD U artists showcase their works at Bau-Xi Gallery as part of the Career Launcher Exhibition!
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The RBC Centre for Emerging Artists & Designers (CEAD) and [**Bau-Xi Gallery**](https://bau-xi.com/) are excited to announce the recipients of the 2026 Bau-Xi Gallery Emerging Exhibition Career Launcher!
Congratulations to Alicia Tian, Ben Janssen, Chimemelie Okafor, Jes Bonnie, Nadine Alexeev, Sofia D'Onofrio, Sue Mackay, and Veronika Bondarenko for receiving this opportunity. Their works will be on display at Bau-Xi Gallery from **July 9 - August 3, 2026**.
**Opening Reception: Sat. July 11th , 1 - 3 PM**
**Location: 1384 Dufferin St. \| Upper Floor**
[**Alicia Tian**](https://workbyalicia.format.com/) is a Toronto-based painter and illustrator and a recent MFA graduate from OCAD University’s Interdisciplinary Art, Media, and Design program. Her work explores ecological understanding through recurring symbolism of mountains and seas, moving between physical and cultural landscapes. Through painting and visual storytelling, she reflects on how encounters with unfamiliar environments, perspectives, and forms of living shape our relationship with the world.
[**Ben Janssen**](https://notbenjanssen.format.com/) is an emerging Indonesian-Dutch-Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto, working primarily in photography. Drawing on backgrounds in architecture and art, his practice explores multiculturalism, memory, time, and identity through carefully structured images that engage with diasporic identity, cultural hybridity, and photography’s role as documentation, reconstruction, and interpretation. Working across digital and analog photography, archival imagery, installation, and emerging moving-image and sound-based practices, he investigates how personal and collective histories shape experiences of belonging across cultures.
[**Chimemelie Okafor**](https://chimemelieokafor.format.com/) (b. 2003) is a Nigerian multidisciplinary artist and designer based in Toronto. She has a BFA in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University (2026). Working primarily with oil paint, her practice is rooted in storytelling, using colour, patterns, and surreal imagery to explore the complexity of the human experience through her own lens.
[**Jes Bonnie**](https://jesbonnie.format.com/) is a Toronto based artist who has recently completed the Sculpture and Installation program at OCAD University. Jes explores themes surrounding memory embodied, sapphic intimacy, and the intersecting aesthetic and grotesque. Working as an interdisciplinary artist with a primary focus on sculpture, she reimagines the boundaries of familiar materials and their associated emotional resonances; bringing to life a uniquely unsettling visual decadence in a wide array of mediums.
[**Nadine Alexeev**](https://nadinealexeev.format.com/) is a contemporary artist based in Toronto, recently graduating from OCAD University with a BFA in Drawing & Painting. Working primarily in oil paint, she explores sites of warped reality through a post-internet feminine lens, filtering through distorted identities, false reflections, and the transformation of our own bodies.
[**Sofia D’Onofrio**](https://sofiadonofrio.format.com/) is a Vaughan based artist specializing in narrative oil paintings. Her practice explores human connection to capture the quiet melancholy centred around the complexities of relationships. Dualities such as presence and absence, love and loss, and connection and disconnection are fundamental in her work, emphasizing the emotions these relationships evoke. In 2026, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Drawing and Painting at OCAD University.
[**Sue Mackay**](https://www.suemackay.com/) is a Canadian artist completing her BFA from OCADU. She is a process-driven painter and is interested in the interplay between transparency, opacity, and light. Sue sits on the Board of Directors at the Artists’ Network and is a past Mentor at the Banff Media Centre’s Emergence Lab.
[**Veronika Bondarenko**](https://veronikabondarenko.format.com/) is a Toronto-based painter and 2026 BFA graduate in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University. Working primarily in oil on canvas, her paintings move between abstraction and recognition, where colour, pattern, atmosphere, and surface hold bodily, symbolic, and interior associations. Her work has been exhibited in Toronto and internationally, and in 2026 she received the Patricia Joy Alpert Memorial Award from OCAD University.
[Learn more about this exhbition and the artworks on display.](https://bau-xi.com/collections/career-launcher-exhibition-ocadu-2026)
## Other Recent News
[### 2026-27 Call for Funding Proposals for Student Groups that Support Creative Entrepreneurship on Campus
The RBC Centre for Emerging Artists & Designers (CEAD) invites OCAD University student groups with a mandate to support entrepreneurship on campus to apply for funding for student-led initiatives that strengthen and expand the creative entrepreneurship ecosystem at OCAD U. This funding is intended to help student groups create opportunities for entrepreneurship skills development, community building, and revenue-generating activities for students and recent alumni, while reducing barriers to participation for equity-seeking individuals.
November 6, 2026
](/news/2026-27-call-funding-proposals-student-groups-support-creative-entrepreneurship-campus)
[### 2027 Critical Distance Centre for Curators Projections Program Call for Artists
OCAD University’s RBC Centre for Emerging Artists & Designers (CEAD) and Critical Distance Centre for Curators (CDCC) have partnered to co-create CDCC Projections Program Career Launcher. Four (4) to five (5) selected emerging artists will receive $690 to exhibit work in a single channel, projection-based screening program that will be displayed at the CDCC in March 2027.
October 30, 2026
](/news/2027-critical-distance-centre-curators-projections-program-call-artists)
[### Call for Vendors: BAM! Holiday Art Market 2026
OCAD University's RBC Centre for Emerging Artists & Designers (CEAD) is excited to partner again with Wychwood Barns to offer a curated group of OCAD U students and recent alumni the opportunity to share a vendor table at the BAM! Holiday Art Market.
October 26, 2026
](/news/call-vendors-bam-holiday-art-market-2026)
Related Stories
## Related Stories
[### 2026-27 Call for Funding Proposals for Student Groups that Support Creative Entrepreneurship on Campus
The RBC Centre for Emerging Artists & Designers (CEAD) invites OCAD University student groups with a mandate to support entrepreneurship on campus to apply for funding for student-led initiatives that strengthen and expand the creative entrepreneurship ecosystem at OCAD U. This funding is intended to help student groups create opportunities for entrepreneurship skills development, community building, and revenue-generating activities for students and recent alumni, while reducing barriers to participation for equity-seeking individuals.
November 6, 2026
](/news/2026-27-call-funding-proposals-student-groups-support-creative-entrepreneurship-campus)
[### 2027 Critical Distance Centre for Curators Projections Program Call for Artists
OCAD University’s RBC Centre for Emerging Artists & Designers (CEAD) and Critical Distance Centre for Curators (CDCC) have partnered to co-create CDCC Projections Program Career Launcher. Four (4) to five (5) selected emerging artists will receive $690 to exhibit work in a single channel, projection-based screening program that will be displayed at the CDCC in March 2027.
October 30, 2026
](/news/2027-critical-distance-centre-curators-projections-program-call-artists)
[### Call for Vendors: BAM! Holiday Art Market 2026
OCAD University's RBC Centre for Emerging Artists & Designers (CEAD) is excited to partner again with Wychwood Barns to offer a curated group of OCAD U students and recent alumni the opportunity to share a vendor table at the BAM! Holiday Art Market.
October 26, 2026
](/news/call-vendors-bam-holiday-art-market-2026)