2013-14 SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM

Shane Arsenault (ACAD) is a photography student at the Alberta College of Art and Design who produces images of architectural facades that capture the essence of the physical structure by alluding to the small and articulate details they contain. Shane has been part of numerous exhibitions, and is co-founder of Nomad Gallery, which has hosted over twenty exhibitions since September 2013. While Shane continues to work on his Façade project, he is also in the process of building his own hand-made 16” x 20” large format camera, to pursue and push the boundaries of his own work.

Shane Arsenault, 10th Ave., 2013, Black and White Film

Corinne Beaumier (Concordia), born in China in 1989 but a Quebecer by adoption, is currently completing a BFA in photography at Concordia University in Montreal. She has participated in several group shows, in Gatineau, Jonquière and Montreal, and in 2013 she curated an exhibition at Montreal’s Z Art Space. In spring 2014, Z Art Space hosted Beaumier’s first solo exhibition, Le fond et la forme, a poetic series based on her archive of personal photographs: images of adoption, some altered physically, others digitally. Her artistic practice deals mainly with photographs and video footage, which she often uses as raw material essential to creating recomposed images. Origins and family are recurrent themes in her work.

Corrine Beaumier, Gamut Warning I from the series Evidences, 2013, Archival Inkjet Print

Michelle LaSalle (Université du Québec) holds a Certificate in Visual Arts from UQAM, where she is pursuing a BA in Visual and Media Arts Education. Her practice is multidisciplinary, but with a primary focus on photography and printmaking. It was during a session as a foreign student at École Nationale de Beaux-Arts de Lyon that she developed an interest in traces and, through them, in identity. Her works often grow out of found images or objects that inspire her because they convey a sort of memory of things experienced or clues to the identity of their former owner. Moi et l’autre is a series of 15 self-portraits in which pinhole-camera photographs are superimposed on found images, thus inserting the artist’s ghostly presence into the history of a family not her own. One of these works was selected for the 15th International Biennial Festival of Portraits, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 2013.

Michelle LaSalle, Moi et l’autre V, 2013, Digital photomontage of found negatives superimposed over pinhole self portraits, 12”x15” (30.5 cm x 38.1cm)

Adrienna Matzeg (NSCAD) currently studies in Halifax, Nova Scotia at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. Adrienna studied ballet and contemporary dance at Canada's National Ballet School, and after graduating, went to Halifax to begin her BFA in Photography. Her photography practice revolves around the investigation of loss and the notion that objects carry a trace of someone’s past. In her most recent work she documents the products, spaces and people behind the scenes of the funeral industry. Adrienna works primarily with digital and experiments with the physical manipulation of photographs.

Adrienna Matzeg, Flower Heart from the series Why do we have Funerals?, 2014, Inkjet Print, 8"x12" (15.2 cm x 30.5 cm)

Alina Senchenko (Emily Carr) was born in Cherkassy, Ukraine in 1991. Alina works mainly with photography, text, installation, and archives, exploring their relationship to one another. Her work is primarily focused on the invisible social and political issues in contemporary society. She attended the Art School of Danila Narbuta and is now studying photography in Emily Carr University of Art and Design. In 2013, her work was included in a group exhibition at the Canadian Center of Architecture in Montreal. In 2014 she was a part of group exhibition at AMS Art Gallery. She lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.

Alina Senchenko, Untitled (The hope was there), from the series Color Revolution, 2013, Photographic banner

Sophie Hackett is the Curator, Photography, at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and adjunct faculty in Ryerson University’s master’s program in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management. She continues to write for art magazines, international journals and artist monographs, including “Queer Looking: Joan E. Biren’s Slide Shows” in Aperture (spring 2015) and “Encounters in the Museum: The Experience of Photographic Objects” in the edited volume The “Public” Life of Photographs (Ryerson Image Centre and MIT Press, 2016). Hackett’s curatorial projects during her tenure at the AGO include Barbara Kruger: Untitled (It) (2010); Songs of the Future: Canadian Industrial Photographs, 1858 to Today (2011); Max Dean: Album, A Public Project (2012); What It Means To be Seen: Photography and Queer Visibility and Fan the Flames: Queer Positions in Photography (2014); Introducing Suzy Lake (2014); and Outsiders: American Photography and Film, 1950s–1980s (2016). In 2017, she was a Fellow with the Center for Curatorial Leadership. She is the lead juror for the 2017 Aimia | AGO Photography Prize, a role she also held in 2014, 2010 and 2012.

Kelly McKinley is the Director of the OMCA Lab at the Oakland Museum of California. Until 2013, she was the Richard and Elizabeth Currie Executive Director, Education and Public Programming at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Canada, where she oversaw the design, development and launch of AGO’s new Weston Family Learning Centre, a $20 million 35,000 square foot community hub for community engagement and educational programming. Prior to the Art Gallery of Ontario, she was Curator of Education at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, an instructor for the Museum Studies Program at the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto, and a Project Manager for Bruce Mau Design in Toronto. She holds a certificate for Performance Measurement for Effective Management of Nonprofit Organizations from the Harvard Business School Executive Program, a Master of Museum Studies, from the University of Toronto, Canada, and a Bachelor of Arts in Art History and French from Queen’s University, Canada.

Erin Shirreff was born in 1975 in Kelowna, British Columbia and now lives and works in New York City. Her long-duration videos extend and explore the act of looking. Constructed from hundreds of individual photographs captured in her studio, these works collapse time and place as they fluctuate between natural and artificial effects, stillness and motion. Projected onto ad hoc structures, the works have a spatial dimension that underscores the materiality of Shirreff’s source photographs. 

Recently she has presented her work in solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, B.C.; White Cube, London, U.K.; Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ont.; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Calif.; and Lisa Cooley, New York, N.Y. Recent group exhibitions include Lens Drawings, Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris, France; The Camera's Blind Spot, Museo d'Arte di Nuoro, Sardinia, Italy; Remainder, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Okla.; Lost Line, LACMA, Los Angeles, Calif.; Voice of Images, François Pinault Foundation, Venice, Italy; Science on the back end, Hauser & Wirth, New York, N.Y.; and Le Silence. Une fiction, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. Her work is in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others.