Join AGO x RBC Artist-in-Residence Mara Eagle as she talks about her project Spawn that was created as part of her research and residency at AGO. 

Spawn is a series of six digital images by artist Mara Eagle. Taking Albrecht Durer's iconic representation of Adam & Eve (housed within the AGO’s collection) as source image, the artist used an AI-driven platform to generate a 3D model from the two-dimensional engraving, from which she painstakingly rendered and regenerated copy after copy. A meditation on creative authorship in the age of algorithmic reproduction, Spawn proliferates the storied, dyadic figures of Adam and Eve into multiple embodied forms in communion with one another. These dancing, plant-like bodies have the texture of mud and the aura of bronzed deities. They are neither organic nor holy, and yet they evoke both categories.

Hovering above the viewer, the figures are meant to be gazed up at, as if in idolatry. Their digitally-simulated depth and volume is untouchable, evidencing both the ‘divine power’ we attribute to AI and the emergence of new definitions of the real. Undergoing hundreds of 3D re-generations, the ‘mother and father of humanity’ become progressively abstract as the algorithm’s glitches accumulate. Spawn is the product of a co-authored process of creation that re-imagines ‘the body’ as an unfixed collective that is hybrid and vast. As the original couple fractures into multiples, they shapeshift across human and plant forms, becoming increasingly indecipherable, and refusing to perform within the binary categories of male/female, and human/non-human.

 Text by Hilary Bergen

Mara Eagle is a multimedia artist based in Montréal. Born in Boston in 1988, she holds a Bachelor of Arts from Marlboro College (Vermont) and a Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University (Montréal). While her background is in traditional media, today her practice grounds in a combination of video, sculpture, and digital mural-making. She is heavily influenced by European art history, the philosophy of science and her longstanding fascination with nature, music, technology and storytelling.

In 2025, she was artist in residence at the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto), and presented work at the Musée d’art de Joliette, Art Toronto, and with the City of Montreal in the public group exhibition “Regarde!”. In 2024, she presented her first large-format digital mural at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal. In 2023 she was nominated for the Pierre-Ayot prize, and had her solo show, PRETTY TALK, featured in the MOMENTA Biennale as Concordia’s 2020 Bronfman Fellow. She is represented by Pangée Gallery, and has recently exhibited at the Fondation Phi, as well as artist run centres across Canada. Her practice has been generously supported by the Canada Council, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Berggruen Institute, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FRQSC) and the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Family Foundation.