Natasha Ashleigh Walter-Pinay

Emily Carr School of Art & Design

Natasha Ashleigh Walter-Pinay is an Indigenous interdisciplinary artist. She originates from the Peepeekisis Cree Nation No. 81 on Treaty 4 territory in Saskatchewan. In her studio research practice, she uses large scale oil painting, jewelry, textiles, and installation as a vessel to explore topics such as; cultural perseverance, embodiment, and reconnection. Additionally, she is a frequent traveller and remains nomadic at heart in practice to reacquaint herself with The Homelands, Turtle Island. Natasha currently works towards her Masters of Fine Art at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and looks forward to pursuing a PhD afterwards.

Ogheneofegor (Fegor) Obuwoma

University of British Columbia

Ogheneofegor Obuwoma (she/they) is a Nigerian-born artist, writer, and arts worker based in Vancouver, on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Working across moving image, photography and installation, their practice considers how colonialism and neocolonial dispossession shape the body, the land, and the conditions under which Black identity and belonging are delimited and negotiated.

Through fragmentation, archival intervention, and the visual language of the spiritual, Obuwoma engages the archive, cartography, and the body as sites through which histories of displacement continue to unfold. Within their practice, Obuwoma also interrogates the histories of film and photography, examining how these media have shaped the representation and material conditions of Black life across the continent and the diaspora, while exploring their potential for intervention and reinvention. Drawing on Indigenous African material traditions and history, Obuwoma considers how inherited histories and materials might be reactivated within contemporary artistic practice. Across these investigations, African futurisms, spiritual traditions, and Christina Sharpe’s concept of wake work inform an ongoing commitment to care, self-determination, and forms of belonging beyond those prescribed by colonial systems.

Alongside their studio practice, Obuwoma is an independent programmer with the Ajoko Film Collective and co-programs African Cinema Now, a contemporary African film series at the VIFF Centre. Their work has been exhibited at the Marianne and Edward Gibson Gallery, Surrey Art Gallery, Gallery Gachet, and The Richmond Art Gallery. Obuwoma holds a BFA in Film and Communications from Simon Fraser University and is currently an MFA candidate in Visual Arts at the University of British Columbia.

Jasper van Alderwegen

University of Victoria

Jasper van Alderwegen is an artist born and based on unceded Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ Territories also known as Victoria, BC. His practice explores abstraction, illusion, and multiplicity as they shape modern identity and social structure under late-stage capitalism, typically working through painting and sound. His process emphasizes experimentation and inexpert handling, using traditional methods imperfectly to foreground spontaneity, contradiction, and emergence. His recent oil paintings abstract and destabilize the visual language of heraldry and vexillology. Reimagining the blazon as a vessel for uncertainty and hope rather than authority, these works undermine the promise of fixed identity and legibility. Soft geometry, misaligned grids, wandering lines, erasures, and provisional marks replace stable symbols, allowing new forms to emerge that remain open, contradictory, and unknowable. This approach extends into sound installation, where musical notation becomes a form of drawing and scores operate as visual and spatial structures. By diluting and reinterpreting inherited systems of order, van Alderwegen’s work acknowledges history while holding space for ambiguity and utopian possibility.

Christopher Outten

Simon Fraser University

Christopher Outten (b. 1993, Nassau, Bahamas) is a Bahamian artist currently based in Vancouver, Canada, where he is pursuing an MFA in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. His interdisciplinary practice explores diasporic identity through painting, sculpture, sound, and performance. Central to his work is the alter ego Kettle Man, a recurring figure that allows him to examine vulnerability, transformation, and the complexities of Black embodiment.

Pippa Bingham

University of British Columbia Okanagan

As a third-year Fine Arts student at UBC Okanagan, Pippa’s area of study focuses on painting; however, she is also interested in learning from ecosystems such as the Okanagan Valley. Her work explores her evolving relationship with nature. Due to the significant increase in forest fires in the Okanagan, Pippa’s paintings reveal the layers of trauma caused by evacuation and destruction. Through the use of semi-transparent washes of acrylic paint, the canvas becomes an extension of herself, allowing her to experience the healing properties of water. The thin layers of paint serve as reminders of the fragility of ecosystems in the face of human disruption.