BEHOLDER: Fanshawe Fine Art Second Year Painting Exhibition

BEHOLDER: Fanshawe College Fine Art second year student exhibition runs from March 12 - March 22 in the main gallery.

Exhibiting artists:

Priya Antone, Jesse Cooper, Julie Cracknell, Slavica Dusic, Gabrielle Flores, Lealah Flynn, Jocelyn Fournier, Ella Hunking, Meggie Kamsataya, Reese Plakholm, Liberty Santchi-King, Alycia Shufelt, Madisson Vanderberg, Vanessa Wiles

About the exhibition:

In a world oversaturated with images, what does it mean to truly see? BEHOLDER asks us

to consider the act of looking itself. Each painting in this exhibition is an assemblage of

borrowed imagery, layered and reshaped into unexpected narratives. Through a process of

projection, tracing, and intuitive composition, second-year fine art students from

Fanshawe College have constructed large-scale works that dissolve the boundaries

between past and present, fact and fiction, personal and collective memory.

Images sourced from books borrowed at the London Public Library, these elements—once

static in their original contexts—are reanimated through the artists' hands.

Working within a limited palette, the artists employ masking, glazing, and texture-building

techniques to navigate the interplay between control and chaos, intention and accident.

The scale of the works amplifies the experience of looking—forcing the viewer to step

closer, to decode the relationships between elements, to become, quite literally, the

beholder.

But in BEHOLDER, perception is not passive. These paintings challenge us to question

what is borrowed, what is invented, and what emerges in the space between. In

reconfiguring visual fragments, the artists construct new worlds—worlds that demand to

be seen.

Curated by Billy Bert Young and the second-year fine art students of Fanshawe College.