Festival Workshops
Saturday June 29
12:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Sunday June 30
12:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Monday July 1
12:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Workshop Description
Slovia welcomes you to her world of mixed-media art. Together, we will create greeting cards using mixed-media collage. We will observe reference images, tear shapes from beautiful papers, glue them in place, then add depth and highlights to create your special brand of magic. Dive into the possibilities!
Artist Statement
Henry David Thoreau once wrote “The world is but canvas to our imaginations.” I use the canvas to reimagine the world. Each painting in my recent exhibit Cleaves renders a significant concept in social justice theory, first underpainted, collaged, then overpainted on canvas. Rendering flowers out of beautiful chiyogami papers, each brushstroke is laden with complex patterning, textures and colours. Cleaves, a semantic enigma simultaneously means to sever and adhere, appropriate to these times of polarisation.
A flower is a fitting metaphor for the body, being beautiful, fragile and precious to the producer. Using the flower as a proxy for embodied institutions, I express the divisions and cohesions of our global economy, intergenerational tensions, disability, prejudice while imagining solutions within beautiful, joyful, engaging paintings. Similarly, the flower also offers an allusion to the transience of time, fragile moments in chronos time and the potential of eternity of the natural world. My art is an expression of my feminist praxis- where practice meets social theory, in work that is cheerful, hopeful, and joyous.
Artist Bio
Edmonton-born Slovia is a maker by nature, a stylist by history, a scholar by need and entrepreneur by career. Slovia descended into the pandemic as a graduate student in the University of Alberta's Women's Studies Department and emerged from it a visual artist. Her artistic training, taken at the University of Alberta's Faculty of Extension, led to her visual expressions of social, political, and cultural theory.
With time and intention, she is painting her graduate degree in Gender and Social Justice. As a mixed-media artist, Slovia's current works are largely in acrylic and Chiyogami paper. The layering of a variety of media offers an assortment of possibilities within her work; meaning of colour, balance and texture all play a role within her imagery.