2025-2026 Cohort
Rahma Abdulkareem
Rahma Abdulkareem, born in Iraq, is a multidisciplinary artist whose work primarily consists of painting and drawing. A recent graduate of OCAD University (2025), her practice explores the intersection of organic form, colour, and material experimentation. Drawing from a deep fascination with processes of change and becoming, Rahma’s work can be seen as a sustained inquiry into the very nature of presence. She is concerned with how a mark, a gesture, or a material itself can act as a vessel for emotional and perceptual experience. Through intuitive mark-making and layered compositions, Rahma investigates how visual language can evoke states of transformation, fluidity, and emotional resonance. Her process is both physical and meditative, building surfaces that are topographies of decision and chance, where control and surrender coexist.
Rahma has exhibited in group and solo in Toronto, most recently participating in OCAD U’s GradEx, where her work drew attention for its sensitivity and depth. Her exceptional skill in drawing was recently recognized with the Nicholas Métivier Drawing Award, and their work was featured in the gallery's newsletter. With a strong interest in material process and gesture, Rahma continues to explore how artwork can exist as a record of presence, a portal for reflection, and a site of connection.
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Leah Evans
Leah Evans is a visual artist from Alberta. Through figurative painting, she critiques suburban socio-political narratives, reflecting on girlhood domestication, fragile memory, and apocalyptic imagery in prairie-gothic settings. Much of her work draws on family film strips, using these archival images as a foundation to address the rituals, symbolic aesthetics, and haunting undercurrents of these environments. The political dimensions of the Gothic have become an increasing aspect of her work, inspired by the disturbing rise of ultranationalist ideologies. Leah’s undergraduate studies culminated in her Honour’s Thesis Exploring Girlhood, where she challenged the submissive expectations and fetishization of feminine youth.
Leah completed her BFA from the University of Lethbridge and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Waterloo. Leah was the 2024 recipient of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts’ Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Scholarship for Visual Arts, and has received the Gushul Studio Residency Prize and the Roloff Beny Foundation Photographic Award in Fine Arts from the University of Lethbridge. She has exhibited across Alberta, including a solo exhibition at Casa Gallery in Lethbridge.
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Lux Gow-Habrich
Lux Gow-Habrich (星尘) is a multi-disciplinary artist and support worker who translates the histories and material teachings of ceramics and textiles to create sculptures and installations dedicated to the intersections of embodiment, cultural identity, care practices, and processes of rupture and repair. They blend gestural, craft, and community storytelling to redefine our understanding of art and cultural practice as sacred remedial forces capable of profoundly reshaping systems and relationships. Her interest in ritual objects, commemoration, and the body as an archive, weaves together diasporic experiences of loss and belonging to unearth unspoken individual and collective legacies of disabled, queer grief and empowerment.
They graduated from NSCAD University in 2015 (BFA Interdisciplinary Arts), and served on the board of The Khyber Centre for the Arts for 5 years as Programming Chair. She has participated in a variety of residencies focused on process and experimentation, often collaborating with fibre and clay from the land to build deepened relationships with these ancient materials. They have exhibited work across Turtle Island and have received numerous provincial and federal grants.
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Sherri Hay
Hay's practice explores the reciprocal interplay between human and non-human forces. It often juxtaposes offcast materials, like waste plastic or Styrofoam, with elemental materials, like water, air, and sand. Their forms slip boundaries between the organic and the constructed.
She is interested in humanity’s evolving relationship with time and history, as well as the unseen forces shaping our world, drawing inspiration from both ancient traditions and contemporary concerns.
More and more, she is an experimenter, asking questions in order to engage deeply with the ecological and spiritual dimensions of creativity.
She is self-taught, and has exhibited around the world. In Ontario, notably at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Powerplant in Toronto.
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Sandra Jabbour
Sandra Jabbour is an interdisciplinary artist whose work blends painting with video projection. She graduated with distinction from the University of Windsor's Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Arts program in 2023, where she was awarded the Jill Dyan-Perry Memorial Bursery for outstanding portfolio work. She is currently a Master of Fine Arts candidate at the University of Waterloo. She served as Vice President of the Vanguard Collective at the Arts Council Windsor-Essex for one year, having been an active member for four years prior. She has exhibited her work in both solo and group exhibitions. Jabbour explores themes related to her Lebanese and Syrian heritage, family dynamics, and childhood nostalgia. Inspired by family photos and home movies, she incorporates nostalgic imagery and early 2000s technology, such as television static and VHS fonts, to evoke familiarity and warmth. By reflecting on her parents' memories and cultural traditions, she preserves fading elements of her childhood environment. Her work sparks nostalgic conversations with family, enhancing emotional connections. Frequently titling her paintings in Arabic, she invites viewers to engage deeply, balancing openness with introspection and encouraging personal reflection.
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Maddie Lychek
Maddie Lychek is a conceptual lens-based artist and curator. Working in video, performance and installation she explores how her body and its consumption can be used as a radical act of self-discovery. Lychek creates a tension between abjection and eroticism engaging with conversations around power and play.
She has presented in venues like Xpace Cultural Centre, and InterAccess and curated for Ed Video Media Arts Centre, InterAccess, and Platforms Project. Maddie holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art, with Distinction from the University of Guelph. Lychek has served as a juror for the Ontario Arts Council, a board member of the Independent Media Arts Alliance and as the Program Director at Ed Video Media Arts Centre.
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James Malzahn
James Malzahn is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines the weaponization of technology and its impact on public autonomy. By combining traditional mediums with electronics, advanced technology, artificial intelligence, and glitch techniques, he investigates themes of surveillance, misinformation, and control. With a background in electronics, data recovery, and audio-visual technology, James creates immersive installations that challenge audiences to confront blurred boundaries between truth and fiction while reflecting on the ethical implications of technology in society.
James holds a BFA with Honours from the University of Manitoba School of Art and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Waterloo. His innovative approach to art and technology has been recognized through numerous grants and awards. By blending craftsmanship with cutting-edge innovation, James invites viewers to critically engage with the forces shaping privacy, autonomy, and digital culture today.
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Elise Popa
Elise Popa (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, working primarily in experimental sound art, which she then translates into visual forms such as drawings and sculptures. Sound is an integral element of her artistic practice, offering a versatile medium through which she explores the intersections of language, visual art, and sensory experience. Influenced by contemporary sound poetry, Elise experiments with the phonetic deconstruction and reconstruction of words to generate new meanings. Language, as a manipulated material is at the core of her creative repertoire, opening pathways for deeper engagement with sound-based art. Elise is experimenting with ceramic sculpture and glazing techniques within her MFA, hoping to merge this medium with her sonic explorations.
Elise graduated from Brock University (St. Catharines, Ontario) in 2022 with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree. She completed a major in Studio Art and a minor in English Literature. Elise is currently a Master of Fine Art student at the University of Waterloo. Elise’s work has been exhibited across Ontario and continues to be exhibited to date.
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