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Main Floor

Reception: Thursday November 27, 7-9 p.m. | View the PDF e-vite

About the show:

The World to Come is about the ever-changing nature of gardens and the many ways they evoke the human condition. This work reckons with the darkness of gardens as colonial symbols of control and human supremacy over nature, and sees their potential as sites for collective reimagining. Within the garden lie a myriad of contradictions: labor and rest, growth and decay, hope and despair, all which seem to pull at each other in opposite directions, but we know them together intimately and we experience their coexistence in our daily lives.

My lived experience serves as my primary material for generating this work. I am inspired by everyday moments of walking, photographing my surroundings, and engaging and conversing with my community. Who I am and the place I make from seeps into everything. I live on Treaty Six territory, a traditional gathering place for diverse Indigenous peoples including the Cree, Saulteaux/Anishinaabe, Blackfoot, Métis, Nakota Sioux, Dene, Inuit, and others. By situating myself in this way, at this particular place and at this particular time, I reckon with the current historical moment we live in. I ask myself what it means to create art at this moment in time, connecting art to a practice of the every day, and using that as a tool to find enchantment in the face of catastrophe and to learn about the world.

A garden may seem like a small thing when trying to navigate our apocalyptic times, but at its best, it is a reminder that caring for the world means caring deeply for our communities and the ecosystems we are a part of. Through printmaking, drawing, installation, and sculpture I turn my studio into a place to transform my own experiences of grappling with the beauty and the pain at the heart of the story of the garden. Drawing from real and imagined gardens –from Milton’s Paradise Lost, to lavish palace gardens, to memories of my childhood home’s garden, to visits to local gardens– I’ve come to see history, land, stewardship, and power all contained within. The whole world is here in the garden.

About the artist:

Olivia Arau McSweeney is a Catalan-American artist from Sitges, Catalonia, Spain currently residing in Amiskwaciwâskahikan on Treaty 6 Territory (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada). Her research examines themes of transformation, hope, care and connection in the context of climate change and other interconnected global disasters. Her studio practice includes printmaking, drawing, sculpture and installation.

About the show:

SHIFT/WORK: Portraits of Precarity transforms the data from the multi-disciplinary project Precarious Work and Mental Health: Exploring Uncertainty through Research-Creation into compelling visual and experiential artworks. The project collaborated with counselling psychologist, Dr. Breanna Lawrence, visual artist, Prof. Lisa Wood, rural health geographer, Dr. Rachel Herron and educational psychologist Dr. Rebecca Hudson Breen, and sought to learn about and describe the lived experiences of people who are experiencing precarious work, and the intersection of uncertainty, mental health and family life in rural Manitoba.

To create SHIFT/WORK: Portraits of Precarity Lisa Wood worked with three artist research assistants, Renata Truelove, Michael Vachon and Dhairya Vaidya. The team created narrative collage-like drawings from photographs and text submitted by recruited participants. The drawings synthesized participant responses to create an understandable picture of the multi-dimensional routine of everyday life being managed simultaneously.

Using coloured pencil and oil paint on drafting film, Wood created participant portraits—with multiple hands and faces of overlapping gestures to amplify the portraits’ visual impact through distillation and repetition. Participants were invited to participate in an interview on camera about their intersectional experiences with precarious work and family. The interviews were coded for body language, looking for repeated gestures that could reveal their felt experiences. The resulting portraits subvert the traditionally stoic, static postures of portraiture and figuration, and seek to reveal the emotional and psychological impacts of the multiple life factors shared in the interviews.

Three dimensional sculptural elements are intertwined with the figurative paintings as a physical representation of the structural systems of precariousness and the impacts of intersectional marginalization and vulnerabilities. Reproductions of the collage-drawings were shredded and rearranged into various forms such as knots, tangles, nets, and woven elements, becoming visual metaphors of deconstruction and reconstruction. The symbolic use of layering, shredding, weaving and entanglement represents chaos, multiple roles and responsibilities, uncertainty, imbalance and anxiety, as well as coping mechanisms, family support and relief.

To accompany the visual artwork, Wood worked with sound artist Brendon Ehinger to compose a multichannel audio collage using the participants’ recorded voices to create fragmented thematic narratives as told in the participants’ own words. The audio combines clips—identified through qualitative analysis— on themes such as the reality and stress of work, experiences of precarity, family support, coping and resilience and the meaning and purpose of work. The result aurally mirrors the visual metaphor of weaving and entanglement.

SHIFT/WORK: Portraits of Precarity is a layered, immersive art experience that amplifies participants’ voices and honours their work and their complex intersectional experiences. Art can move people and reach audiences in a way that other forms of research outputs can not, and in this way SHIFT/WORK seeks to generate empathy and create social impact.

About the artists:

Lisa Wood is a visual artist and Associate Professor at IshKaabatens Waasa Gaa Inaabateg Department of Visual Art at Brandon University. With an a MFA from Yale University and a BFA from the University of Manitoba, her figurative art practice broadly investigates inclusion, marginalization and interpersonal connections. Her work celebrates others, rarely venerated by portraiture: those who are decidedly not of the aristocracy and not of great wealth. These have included herself, older women, trans youth, equity seeking artists and seasonal agricultural workers. She has been the recipient of many awards and scholarships and exhibits her painting and prints nationally and internationally.

Renata Truelove is a recent Brandon University graduate, majoring in Psychology and minoring in Drawing. Aspiring to work in the field of creative arts therapies, Renata is passionate about how creative expression can promote well-being and serve as a meaningful research modality, offering unique insights into complex human experiences. This project provided her with the opportunity to work at the intersection of arts and psychology, strengthening her belief in the value of integrating these disciplines to advance research and understanding in mental health. Renata resides in Cypress River, Manitoba, and has participated in the Co-op program at Brandon University.

Michael Vachon is a Drawing Major pursuing his BFA at Brendon University. He grew up on his family farm outside of Oak Lake Manitoba, and has first-hand experience with precarious work and rural living. Michael was commissioned to contribute drawings to the recently released book “Uncut: A Cultural Analysis of the Foreskin”, by Dr. Jonathan Allan, and is set to be the first ever visual art student to graduate from the Co-op program at Brandon University in 2027.

Dhairya Vaidya was born in Gujarat, India in 2002. He has pursued training in a range of mediums and styles, including acrylics, watercolour, oil, graphite, charcoal, and coloured pencil. Dhairya experiments with hybrid mediums consisting of both traditional and digital art. Dhairya is currently pursuing his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in drawing and digital art in a joint program between Brandon University and Assiniboine College in Brandon, Canada.

Brendon Ehinger is a Red River Métis/Settler multi-instrumentalist and sound artist based in Brandon, MB, Canada. He is employed as an audio technician on this project to create the thematically organized sound pieces based on interview recordings. Since 2016, he has been using a combination of modular synthesis, acoustic instrumentation, live mic input and field recordings to explore the acoustic ecology of relationships between technology and the environment. He has performed solo and collaboratively in alternative spaces, galleries and venues in Canada and Europe. 

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Artist Talk: Lisa Wood and Breanna Lawrence

Thursday, November 27 | 11 a.m. 

Education Centre South, Room 122

Behind the scenes of SHIFT/WORK: Portraits of Precarity

Drawing Insights through Research-Creation

Join artist Lisa Wood (Associate Professor, Brandon University) and researcher Breanna Lawrence (Associate Professor, University of Victoria) as they discuss the process behind the collaborative exhibition SHIFT/WORK: Portraits of Precarity. The show asks what the intersection of precarious work, mental health and family life looks and sounds like by amplifying participants’ voices and honouring their work and their complex intersectional experiences. SHIFT/WORK is the artistic outcome of the interdisciplinary SSHRC-funded project “Precarious Work and Mental Health: Understanding Uncertainty through Research-Creation”. Topics discussed will include mentorship and collaboration in artistic creation, cross-disciplinary investigation, visual art as qualitative analysis, and the rich potential of research-creation methodology as a form of knowledge creation and mobilization. Art can move people and reach audiences in a way that other forms of research outputs cannot; this discussion will explore how SHIFT/WORK seeks to generate empathy and create social impact.

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2025-2026 Exhibitions

September 2-27, 2025

• Main Floor: Sky, Stone, and Prairie: Plein Air Perspectives of Alberta | Samantha Williams-Chapelsky
• Second Floor: The Paris Sketchbooks | Robert Shannon

October 3, 2025

• Homegrown | VASA Annual Art Auction

October 14 - November 8, 2025

• Main Floor: The Forest - Where We Belong | Eunna Oh, MFA in Painting
• Second Floor: Monstrous & Tender | a curated group exhibition by Marilène Oliver

November 25-December 18, 2025

• Main Floor: Olivia Arau McSweeny, MFA Thesis Printmaking
• Second Floor: Precarious Work and Mental Health: Exploring Uncertainty through Research-Creation | Lisa Wood, Dr. Breanna Lawrence and Dr. Rebecca Hudson Breen, and Dr. Rachel Herron. With Artist-research assistants—Renata Truelove, Michael Vachon, and Dhairya Vaidya

January 13 - February 7, 2026

• Main Floor: Help! I Need Somebody. Help! Not Just Anybody | An exhibition of artwork and creative research by Technical Demonstrators in Art & Design.
• Second Floor: Alcuin Society Awards for Book Design in Canada

February 24 - March 21, 2026

• Main Floor: X-Painting | Jesse Thomas
• Second Floor: Sheryl Spencer, MFA Thesis Printmaking

March 31 - April 11, 2026

• 2026 Bachelor of Design Graduation Exhibition

April 21 - May 2, 2026

• 2026 Bachelor of Fine Art Graduation Exhibition

May 26 - June 20, 2026

• Aynaz Raoufian, MFA Thesis Intermedia
• Mona Sahi, MFA Thesis Intermedia