Dec 183 min read

Member Exhibition

Featuring works from Melissa Brunner, Jessie Buchanan, Chanel DesRoches, Nancy Farrell, and Kayla St-Pierre.

Jessie Buchanan is an Indigenous visual artist living and working in Guelph, Ontario. Her studio painting practice places emphasis on the process of painting as personal healing both in the painting itself and in some type of articulation of the artist's lived experience on the canvas; working through emotions and the challenges of the modern world.

Chanel DesRoches is an artist working in painting, drawing, and printmaking based in

Guelph, Ontario. She holds a Master of Fine Arts (2024) from York University and a

Bachelor of Arts, Honours (2019) in studio art from the University of Guelph. Her practice involves large-scale painting and drawing, investigating themes around muscle memory, distraction, tactics, identity, and materiality. Surrounding the surface with constant interruption and infinite misguiding, the tangling of painterly gestures and sporadic mark making brings forward feelings of overwhelm. Expressed in her painting, she often leans on deflection tactics as an easy escape and avoidance strategy in social interactions or conversations that provoke dialogue and reflection from her younger self. Her practice involves pretending, improvising, and reacting to each mark, gesture,colour, and form, obsessively intrigued by the emergence of material interactions. Driving from personal experience, Chanel relentlessly engages with painting in the moment, allowing herself to interchangeably utilize intuition and compulsion as a means for mark making.

28 years young, Melissa Brunner (she/her) is a Deaf, Queer, and Disabled visual artist. Born and raised in Guelph, Melissa's artistry explores the interplay of evoking emotions in portraits with layers of hues. She is known for her insightful watercolour portraits that capture subtle nuances in mood. Her hands intuitively reach for watercolour and gouache paints, but you can find her creating with acrylic + oil paints, polymer clay, embroidery, crochet, and sketches in her little notebook.

In this period of time, Melissa is researching and documenting physical somatic manifestations through her art. In ‘Waiting for the Worms’, the painting highlights the length of time it takes to rest and recover. Similar to the cycles of death and rebirth, the bones are buried in disconnection leading up to being whole, growing again in nature.

Kayla St-Pierre is a recent graduate of the University of Guelph for their Studio Art program. She was chosen by her professors to represent the program alongside three other painters at the Artist Project in 2024. She hosts a series on YouTube called Artist Talks where she interviews artists as a way of giving back to the community.

Nancy Farrell completed a Honours BA in Fine Art from the University of Guelph, and

continued her art studies through workshops in Canada and the United States, studying

with Peter Kolsnyk and John Leonard in Canada and Steve Aimone and Nicholas Wilton

in the US. Working in sculpture, painting and mixed media, she has participated in the

Toronto Outdoor Exhibition as well as over 100 solo, group and juried exhibitions.

This award-winning artist has always been intrigued with the endless potential of

abstract and non-objective painting. She is drawn to colour and gestural mark making.

She often distills past memories of landscape into her highly imaginative paintings.

Featured Work

Waawaaskeshii Kwe (Deer Woman)

20 x 40 inches

Acrylic on Canvas