Proof is Gallery 44’s annual group exhibition of work by emerging Canadian artists, reflecting a range of current concerns and practices in contemporary photography and lens-based media. Proof is often one of the first exhibitions in a professional context for an emerging artist. Past exhibitions have featured work by Kotama Bouabane, Leila Fatemi, Isabelle Hayeur, Anique Jordan, Laurie Kang, Germaine Koh, Luther Konadu, Meryl McMaster, Elise Rasmussen and Althea Thauberger.
For more information read Interstitial Spaces and Blurred Demarcations with Shirin Fathi, Shohreh Golazad, Karishma Pranjivan, Xan Shian, an essay by curator, artist and writer Dallas Fellini.
Shirin Fathi is an Iranian-Canadian artist whose work focuses on cultural changes in relation to gender identity. Through role-play and the use of cosmetics, masks and prosthetics, Fathi uses her own body as a subject to stage ambiguous and often marginalized identities.
Shohreh GolAzad is a graduate student at OCAD university in New Media Art History program, currently focused on writing her MRP-major research paper- on Representation of the Middle Eastern Self. She immigrated to Canada in 2014 from her beloved hometown, Tehran, Iran. She was trained as a traditional oil painter in Tehran and holds a four-year diploma in painting and drawing, besides her BA in translation linguistics. She considers herself as a wayfarer in this journey of finding her footing in her artistic practice. Now her medium of choice is, but not limited to, a mixture of photography and fabric art. Her works have won both national and international acclaim and she has been exhibited in both venues. Immigration, although, acted as a hindrance to her artistic practice, yet it has also both informed and inspired her academic and artistic practice. Shohreh GolAzad is interested in the questions of identity, decolonial imagination and dreaming.
Karishma Pranjivan b. Toronto, 1994 is a multidisciplinary visual artist living and working between Toronto and New York. She holds a Bachelors of Arts Degree in Creative Direction from the University of the Arts London (2016) and sustains a strong interest in image-making, design, shape, and movement while utilizing a diverse set of disciplines to approach her work. Her most recent works investigate spaces and narratives surrounding South Asian identity, privacy and anonymity.
Xan Shian is an interdisciplinary artist and writer, and recent graduate of the MFA program at UBC, whose practice uses the presence and absence of memory to question the corporeal tensions that manifest within her body. Xan's work examines how the Scottish and Gaelic folklores she grew up hearing help navigate the in-between spaces of personal, cultural and material encounter by seeking what is absent or unaccounted for. She has written for and shown works at spaces including the Polygon Gallery (Vancouver), Project Pangée (Montreal), the Ou Gallery (Duncan), and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (Vancouver). Xan makes art and lives as an uninvited guest on the traditional and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
