In/existence approaches the events of life, death and the processes that are critical to the natural world and the realms of culture. Investigating the natural and artificial, the everyday and the sublime, these six emerging artists envision a future that is unfixed, unresolved, and marked by infinite possibility.

Hailly Lucas and Ailish Sadowick explore natural forms in both their sublimity and toxicity. Lucas’s wall mounted abstract sculptural landscapes are created from dried local flora and fauna. She infuses the tradition of landscape painting to explore the fragile allure of the regional ecosystems. Sadowick similarly refers to the landscape with diametrically opposed materials in her resin and concrete constructions. Representing land and water, Sadowick conveys the omnipresence of plastics and other contaminants in the so-called ‘natural’ environment.

Randi Pert’s works explore the emotional significance of textile items in our current culture, how they grow, shed and change along with us. Pert manipulates the textiles through deconstruction: cutting, tearing, fraying. Layering sewing and embroidery, she hopes to bring a sense of comfort and belonging to the viewer. Theodore Soliman too explores fabrics, in ways related to the extraordinary as opposed to the everyday. Soliman’s mirrored and metal textiles play with the illusory and symbolic qualities of fabric as substances, which simultaneously conceal and reveal the wearer’s identity, while reflecting the world around them.

Amanda Dong considers Chinese Canadian cultural identity with reference to traditional foods, like bok choy, which she grows in a communal garden. The artist invites participants to take vegetables from the garden and plant seeds for the next person to enjoy, to highlight the processes of labour and consumption surrounding the foods we eat.

For Andrea Cisneros, the idea that words are critical to interpersonal and intercultural exchange is central to her practice. Her hand-printed text cards provide didactic engagements with the histories of language. Cisneros displays words with the year of their introduction into the English dictionary to show the evolution of language within an ever-shifting cultural ethos.