The New Gallery · art futures: Relationships with Land, Part 1

The New Gallery · art futures: Relationships with Land, Part 2

The New Gallery · art futures: Relationships with Land, Part 3

Biographies /

Jennifer Brant is an interdisciplinary artist whose emergent research and material-based practice tries to concurrently experience, facilitate, and chronicle interactions with both the human and more-than-human world. She explores systems and relationships, marginalized spaces, complicated emotional states, and futurity. Using installations and interventions, field studies, textile practices, ceramics, writing, and drawing, she encourages and documents moments that bring an awareness of interconnection and kinship, gently interrupt passivity, and cultivate alternative narratives to our current mythologies of progress and nature.

Born and raised on the West Coast, an uninvited guest on the stolen territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh  (Squamish) and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ /Selilwitulh (Tslei-wa-tuth) people, as well as on the territory of the Tla-amin people, she divides her time between Vancouver and xʷɛʔɛt̓ay (Lasqueti Island), a small island off the grid. Brant holds a BFA and MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and a BEd from the University of British Columbia.

Jennifer Ireland is a multimedia artist working to reconfigure ways of knowing and ways of being in land through the questioning of traditional epistemologies and abstract boundaries.  Ireland strives to make work that is mindful of situation, site, context, and access.  This ethic is found in her work through specific materials and methods which are often light, sustainable and provisional.  Ireland’s multi-medium, research-based practice ranges from drawing, photography, video, and sculpture, to site-sensitive installation and performance.  Each artwork is made as a proposition that operates simultaneously as suggestion and possibility for de-colonial wayfinding in the Anthropocene.

As a Treaty 7 person, Ireland’s home is in Mohkinstsis/Calgary, Alberta, in the foothills between the prairies and the Rocky Mountains, the traditional lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy: Kainai, Piikani, Siksika, the Tsuu T’ina, and Îyâxe Nakoda Nations and the peoples of the Métis Nation (Region 3).  Ireland holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Calgary, studied drawing and sculpture at Alberta University of the Arts, and recently graduated from the 2018 Masters of Fine Arts at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

Mehran Modarres-Sadeghi is a visual artist based in Vancouver, BC. Originally from Isfahan, Iran, she immigrated to Canada 20 years ago where she has received an MFA in Visual Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2017) and a BFA from University of British Columbia (2007). Her recent practice is mostly engaged with drawing and sculpture, although she has worked in a variety of media such as photography, painting, and installation. Modarres-Sadeghi has exhibited her work at several art galleries in British Columbia, including group exhibitions at the Cityscape Community Art Space, Surrey Art Gallery, Concourse Gallery (ECU), as part of MFA Interim exhibition, Charles H. Scott Gallery (ECU), as part of MFA graduate exhibition, and most notably Centre A, as part of a group exhibition, Spring Exhibition, in spring 2017. Modarres-Sadeghi’s last exhibition was a solo exhibition at the Doris Crowston Gallery (at the Sunshine Coast Arts Council) in Sechelt, BC, in spring 2020. Modarres-Sadeghi’s next exhibition is a solo exhibition at Gallery 1515 in Vancouver, BC, in fall 2020.

Territorial Acknowledgments /

TNG gratefully acknowledges its home on the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region, including the Blackfoot Confederacy (Kainai, Piikani and Siksika), Métis Nation of Alberta Region III, Stoney Nakoda First Nation (Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Wesley), and Tsuu T’ina First Nation. TNG would also like to acknowledge the many other First Nations, Métis and Inuit who have crossed this land for generations.