The ways of looking that these artists propose can be seen as an embodied and interlinked way of looking at place and community — together, the works in this show suggest provocations for a livable future made possible by nurturing a community that is entangled with one another and enmeshed in our surroundings.
Within, With All
A Bow Valley Emerging Artist Exhibition by Hannah Antonsen, Kat Ocean, and Megan Parker
NOVEMBER 12 – DECEMBER 17
Nov. 12 - Dec. 17, 2026
FREE
Friday, Nov. 13, 6:00-7:30pm
See the Artwork
Meet The Artists
Megan Parker
Megan Parker’s acrylic painting practice renders sites across the Bow Valley lovingly, treating local landscapes with the studied attention of a portraitist. The specific importance of these rendered sites to their artist is implicit; these are places activated by the history of the personal and familial relationships that have grown and been strengthened here. Here, they take on a metonymic quality, each one a depiction of a significant moment in the artist's life--at the same time, the centrality of the land itself in these moments invites the possibility of kinship with nature. Parker’s attention to the kind of companionship that mountains, trees and rocks might offer suggests a way of thinking that resonates with Donna Haraway’s concepts of companionship, where bonds form between and across generations, species, and beings, and individuality and “self-making” must be abandoned in service of thinking together and being with one another.
Kat Ocean
The photographic works by Kat Ocean in this exhibition are also concerned explicitly with relationships. The figures occupying the artist’s monumental landscapes are a community of women entrepreneurs and colleagues, and in each seasonal tableau, Ocean choreographs a kind of speculative reality where it is collaboration and sisterhood that shape the interactions between people, animals and the land. In these idyllic spaces, and in the upcycled garments clothing their inhabitants, we can also feel her intention to find more ethical ways of living, lessening the environmental impact of these interdisciplinary creative experiments and creating on and with the land without extracting from it. Resonances may be found, again, with Haraway, whose groundbreaking Staying With the Trouble proposes the necessity of “sym-poeisis,” or “making together,” in order to build livable futures on a damaged earth.
Hannah Antonsen
When mounted, Hannah Antonsen’s tufted landscapes can be seen the way one might look at panoramic mountain landscapes traditionally rendered in paint, but viewed close, their fabric surfaces appear abstracted, each tuft like a dot of pointillist brushwork. Approaching the works in this way offers an experience less like viewing a work on a gallery wall and more like looking straight down at the network of moss and lichens on a forest floor. Oriented this way, the textural quality of each fibre becomes perceptible—noticing the yarn Antonsen upcycles from textile waste, for example, might prompt us to think of the previous lives these fabrics might have lived. Her landscapes call for an embedded way of looking, one that suggests presence and attention to the particularities and specificity of this moment. As Antonsen suggests, the texture and materiality of her works also physically invite a non-visual, tactile mode of access; offering an alternate, more experiential, way of engaging with her art.
RISE Emerging Artist Program is generously supported by
