“Sonder — n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” 1

Tosha Callaway sees painting as a vehicle to explore the concept of metacognition, a symptom of human nature that both causes isolation, but also motivates our desire to connect with others. By approaching conventional subjects—such as landscapes and domestic scenes—through a contemporary lens, she investigates the value that these longstanding art practices hold for both herself and the present-day viewer.

Originally from the Eastern Townships in Quebec, Callaway has always been interested in communal sensitivities to nostalgia for small town life. Moving to the city for her studies, she began to crop together scenes from highly populated cityscapes with everyday suburban scenes and urban landscapes. By fabricating shifting environments, she seeks to reveal a sense of dislocation between these two lifestyles.

More recently, Callaway has turned to depicting figures in their domestic environments. This intermingling of the new and the old marks a fundamental synchronization between her creative process and the conceptual outcome of her work. She is inspired by non-traditional portraiture, such as the poetic and narrative-based paintings of both Hernan Bass and the artist duo Markus Muntean and Adi Rosenblum. Callaway plays with contrasts of saturation and muted tones, and layering to emphasize the fragility of human cognizance. Moreover, the mundane nature of the scenes she portrays reflects her fascination with capturing moments of emotional ambiguity between individuals.

Despite their physical proximity, her figures often embody a feeling of disconnect that she presents as inherent to modern life. Her latest series explores intergenerational relationships, and the social division between folks of different ages that often complicates our views on life’s different phases.

1 John Koenig, 2021, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (New York : Simon & Schuster, 2021).

Maïthé Cyr-Morin’s work addresses themes such as the visible and the invisible through the lens of fictocriticism, mainly in the form of collage, printmaking, and sewing. The artist’s book is a key medium for her to investigate these ideas.

Reminiscent of personal memories and intimate in size, the book’s materiality invites the viewer to access the idiosyncratic revelations of the artist, at a well-calculated pace and impelling multiple senses. Through paper making and assemblage as processes inscribed in time and space, she plays with facsimile and the imaginary.

Cyr-Morin’s most recent work revolves around the psychological complexities of the individual within the framework of modern psychiatry as a convoluted social reality. Her exploration of the psyche is a way of healing and mending the tangled threads of her own experiences with mental illness, particularly with bipolar disorder.

The catharsis generated by this creative introspection allows Maïthé Cyr-Morin to create a vocabulary punctuated with bittersweet metaphors and latent symbols.

Emma Huebchen is fascinated by the natural patterns of the vessels we call home: the human body and the environment.

Inspired by both the vast ocean flowing around Vancouver Island—her hometown—, and the flourishing, colorful forests surrounding her current home in the Eastern Townships, Huebchen’s practice revolves around her interpretation of the body’s complex and multifaceted nature, through a process of simplification. She distorts and carves human anatomy, showing the fragility and shallowness of the bodily experience.

While particularly fond of watercolor, acrylic paint, and ink on wood, she creates with any medium available to her. Finding balance in large shapes, expansive color palettes, and bewildering patternmaking soothes her.

Huebchen’s work is a reflection of her interests in nature, fashion, and the body, as well as her own states of mind. Sensitive to the pressure and expectations weighing on her shoulders as she approaches graduation, she perseveres through hardships with a dream of becoming a part-time high school art teacher and a professional artist.

Through form, color, and elongated, contorted words, she processes difficult and pressing parts of her life. She records and imprints her emotions at the heart of her creative practice; she lets her pieces speak for her.

When Majd Shammas was uprooted by the war in Syria, a world of certainty was shattered, and tension and uncertainty became predominant. From that point onwards, Shammas has been in a constant exploration of the resulting “fragments”.

While dismantling the whole into fragments allows for a better examination of one reality, the collecting and reassembling of these fragments offers an infinity of new possibilities. This process is at the core of Shammas’ artistic process. For him, the bolder the fragmentary impressions—in terms of visceral impact, asymmetry, movement, and aggressiveness—, the more vital it becomes to make images out of them.

Inspired by the realm of unconsciousness explored by Butoh dancers from Japan, Shammas’ latest series, Mirrors (2021-2022), consists of “inner-self-portraits” picturing daily existential reflections and uncertainties. They are abstract landscapes of hallucinations and realities derived from the tension between the emotional and the rational, the ethereal and the material, residing within, or on the body’s borders. They are reflections of the tension between what boils inside of us and what is transferred to the outside. The series portrays the inner commotion of the state of being.

Shammas’ fragmentary approach manifests itself in the coarse appearance of his surfaces, with strong brushstrokes, a marked distribution of color in space, and rough transitions of tones. His mixed media exploration spans over drawing, painting, and printmaking, while combining mediums like ink, charcoal, acrylics, and pastels soaked in canola oil to infuse his works with a specific ambiance.