Exhibition opens Friday, May 9 at 5 p.m. and runs through July 25, 2025.
IN DEEP is a group exhibition that observes complex narratives around extraction.
Together, Frédéric Bigras-Burrogano, Lori Blondeau, Gina Brooks, Emily Critch, Gillian Dykeman, Tsēmā, and New Mineral Collective care for intricate and intertwined histories while planting seeds for a future where land and body are valued beyond capitalist systems.
By way of their processes, actions, and transmissions, the artists decentralize core values of extractive activities, such as power, greed, and ownership, to create space for shared meaning-making, wonder, and learning in the pursuit of healing strategies for change.
In their works, relationships with the land, bodies, the more-than-human world, and one another are honoured and replenished.
Amy Ash (she/they) is invested in collective care through processes of shared meaning-making.
Her practice flows from curatorial projects and writing to teaching, socially engaged action, and hands-on making. Across disciplines, they trace connectivity through intersections and overlaps between memory, learning, and wonder, to incite curiosity and kindle empathy.
Often working collaboratively, she seeks to build connection by gently disrupting hierarchy to carve out space for a polyphony of personal meaning to be created within the context of a shared experience.
Of white settler ancestry, they live in Menahqesk/Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, which sits on unceded and unsurrendered lands that have been cared for by the Wolastoqiyik, Peskotomuhkati, and Mi’kmaq Peoples since the very beginning.
Frédéric Bigras-Burrogano is an artist and curator based in Tio’tià:ke/Mooniyang (so-called “Montreal”). Their research-creation work is situated in affect theory, Energy Humanities and decolonial practices.
Bigras-Burrogano has shown in group and solo exhibits internationally. Notable presentations include Krakow Photography Festival (2016), The Bundy Museum, Binghamton, USA (2019), Platform 21, Winnipeg, Canada (2022) and Sapspace, Berlin, Germany (2023).
Their artworks and curatorial projects have received funding from institutions such as Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (2016), UQAM (2020), Médiane (2020) and Canadian Council for the Arts (2019, 2021), among others.
Bigras-Burrogano is currently pursuing an Interdisciplinary PhD at Concordia University with the support from FRQSC.
Lori Blondeau is an influential contemporary artist of Cree, Saulteaux, and Métis from Saskatchewan, Canada, Treaty Four.
Since the 1990s, she has established an interdisciplinary artistic practice encompassing performance, photography and installation art.
Alongside her creative endeavors, Blondeau played a vital role in the Indigenous art community as the co-founder and Executive Director of the Indigenous art collective TRIBE, significantly contributing to the prominence of Indigenous art and knowledge in Canada.
Blondeau’s work has been showcased in numerous group and solo exhibitions, earning her recognition as a pivotal figure in contemporary art. In addition to her artistic practice, she has served as an Associate Professor at the University of Manitoba School of Art since 2018, where she mentors emerging artists.
Her contributions to the field were acknowledged when she received the prestigious Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2021, highlighting her significant impact on the art landscape in Canada and beyond.
Elder Gina Brooks is a Wәlastәkwew storyteller and educator from Sitansisk. She resides in her traditional unceded homeland and is informed by Waponahki traditional knowledge in her brown ash basketry, porcupine quill and birch bark basketry, moose hair embroidery, pottery, carving and painting.
She studied the tradition of birch bark basketry with David Moses Bridges in Sipayik. Gina's life is inspired by her people, and she sees art as an opportunity to learn and share about herself and her responsibilities through ancient stories, symbols, motifs and language.
She is a former Schoodic Institute Artist in Residence, and her work is prominently featured in the core exhibit of the Abbe Museum, titled People of First Light.
She is the founder of Caribou Club, a land-based arts, recreation, and treaty education facility, and she offers land-based teachings in her community as part of the Nuhkmoss, Muhsoms, Naka Ni’l program, which nurtures connections between Elders and youth.
Tsēmā is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist, mentor, mentee, mother and descendant of Tāłtān Matriarchy, living and working on Ohlone Lands in Berkley, California.
Using strategies of care and resistance,Tsēmā creates work that connects materials to mine sites and bodies to the land. This practice cites her Indigenous mentorships, Potlatch, studies in visual culture and time in the mountains.
She has studied at K'saan, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and earned an Interdisciplinary Masters of Art Media and Design from OCAD U.Tsēmā has exhibited and performed in Canada, the US and beyond.
Gillian Dykeman (she/her) is a visual artist, curator, college instructor and writer living alongside the Wolastoq in New Brunswick. She has exhibited her work in Vienna, Los Angeles, Anchorage, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, London (ON), Charlottetown and throughout New Brunswick.
She has a MVS from the U of T, and a BFA from NSCAD. Dykeman is queer, a mother, and neurodivergent; these experiences inform a sensitivity in her art and interpretive work.
Working through an intersectional feminist and postcolonial framework, Dykeman seeks to empower her audiences through playful and critical art, often collaborative or participatory in nature.
Open to experimental venues, her work has found its way into galleries, exercise studios, a rare book library and a geodesic dome.
Emily Critch is a Mi’kmaw + settler curator, art historian writer, and artist from Elmastukwek, Ktaqmkuk Territory (Bay of Islands, NL).
Emily has created or co-created 15 curatorial projects since becoming an independent curator in 2018 and has been an arts worker for over a decade. Emily is invested in art practices and histories within their home territory, curatorial practice, mentorship and print media.
They have exhibited their work in group exhibitions at venues such as Platform Centre for the Arts, Grenfell Art Gallery, The Rooms, Eastern Edge and Hafnarborg (Hafnarfjörður, Iceland).
Emily has presented solo exhibitions of their work at Eastern Edge, St. Michael’s Printshop and Galerie Sans Nom. Their artistic and curatorial projects have been supported by ArtsNL and Canada Council for the Arts, and they were the recipient of the 2020 VANL Cox & Palmer Pivotal Point Grant as well as the 2020-2021 Don Wright Scholarship at St. Michael's Printshop.
New Mineral Collective (NMC) is the collaborative practice of Canadian artist Tanya Busse and Lithuanian artist Emilija Škarnulytė.
Working across sculpture, photography, and time-based media, the artists look at contemporary landscape politics, particularly at the practices of extractive economies that convert natural resources into global commodities, to critically examine and reconceptualize the nature of human interaction with the Earth.
As an organism, NMC infiltrates the extractive industry with alternative forces such as; desire, body mining and acts of counter prospecting.
Their work has been shown nationally and internationally, including: Salzburg Kunstverein (2025), Mercer Union, Toronto (2025), University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane (2023), Lofoten International Art Festival, Svolvær (2022), Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2021), Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo (2021), Tate Modern’s Starr Cinema, London (2021), Seoul Museum of Art (2020), The Swedish Center for Architecture and Design, Stockholm (2020), Tromsø Kunstforening (2019), Toronto Biennial of Art (2019), Serpentine Galleries, London (2018), SIART International Biennial of Art, Bolivia (2016), Artists’ Film International, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015).
Their current headquarters are in Tromsø, Norway.
