In Every Lifetime

In Every Lifetime is an exhibition collecting the disparate practices of 2025’s seven graduating Bachelor of Fine Arts students. What guides the creation and curation of the artworks presented are the acts of navigating and cherishing art and artistic media, recognizing it as vital to our lives and our prosperity. From ceramics to gouache, from printmaking to comics, we are all intimately familiar with the value art brings to us and its capacity to communicate, to provoke, or to heal as we grow through our lives and artistic practices. Together, the work we showcase here offers intimate glimpses into what our practices entail and why being anything but artists would do ourselves a disservice.

An artistic practice is a lifelong journey, and as such it both demands and deserves the taking of risks. Experience, upbringing, troubles, memories, and epiphanies bleed onto paper, into clay, onto canvas, and into print. From there, we work so they can bloom into art, powered by our stubbornness, our resolution, or even our spite. Thus, we invite each patron to wander our garden and familiarize themselves with the value art brings to each of our lives and the meaning we find or instill within it.

Tianna Delorme is a nêhiyaw artist from Cowessess First Nation. For her, art is a way to explore and communicate both the positive and negative experiences of existing as an Indigenous woman in Canada. The importance of her spirituality is acutely felt in her work, influencing the acrylic paintings and mixed media drawings she uses to document the lasting effects of colonialism on her family and culture.

Dakota Erickson is a Saskatchewan raised feminist and visual artist. Her art creates a dialogue on femininity, girlhood, nostalgia, and the male gaze. She combines oil painting with photo collage and found objects to create large-scale, saccharine paintings. She exaggerates traditional femininity to the point of unease and encourages women, especially in art-making, to be unapologetic in filling a traditionally male space.

Courtney Froess is a comic and mixed-media artist from Saskatchewan. She conceptualizes art as something that is born of frictions, and she uses it to explore the frictions between perception, power, identity, and self-worth. She uses ink, gouache, coloured pencil, and digital tools to render these topics into narrative comics and still drawings from a humanist and egalitarian perspective.

 Julien Hamon-Fafard is a multidisciplinary artist that approaches art as a meditative experience. He makes tactile pieces out of wood, bronze, and ceramics while letting the idiosyncrasies of each material guide each finished piece. Rather than being a way to communicate meaning, his artistic process is a way to discover and imbue it.

Yanique Henry is a Caribbean-Canadian artist that uses traditional and analog mediums to explore the gain, loss, and hybridity of contemporary culture experienced by many diasporas. Her work meticulously combines hatching techniques with mixed media and collage to examine metaphors of ambiguous and fragmented islands present within daily life. Using this representation of Caribbean landscapes, she not only encapsulates her island heritage, but also creates symbols of collective isolation and refuge.

Rey Hesterman is an artist living on Treaty Four territory that employs printmaking as a metaphor and tool for examining the experiences of grief and loss. She augments her work with symbols of sympathy and incorporates text to heighten emotional contrast, while often adding elements of place and the meaning it can carry as one navigates the grieving process.

Erica Mae Lepiten is a Filipino artist who explores themes of youth and the coming of age. She uses physical and digital mediums to weave stories that bring comfort and guidance to those navigating the transition to adulthood. Drawing on her love for visual storytelling, she encourages others to celebrate the journey of growing up while still cherishing the joys of childhood.

Artists’ contemporary spaces can feel scarce and are often fraught with instability and doubt. However, despite the uncertainties of the role, there is great fulfillment to be found in the simple act of imbuing a work with life. What led each of us to participate in this exhibition and what experiences we chose to carry with us are as varied as our media and practices, yet in all of our lifetimes we are each of us an artist.

Courtney Froess
Yanique Henry