Earthlings is the final exhibition showcasing new artworks developed during an international artist residency at the Ionian Center for the Arts and Culture on the Greek island of Kefalonia in the Ionian Sea.  Organized and curated by Natasha Faye Jensen and Patrick Moskwa, the residency brought together thirteen Canadian artists to investigate the intersections of art, ecology, and place on Kefalonia. The resulting exhibition at The New Gallery showcases photography, drawing, collage, sculpture, and botanical materials gathered through field research, considering landscapes as living archives where ecology, geology, history, and human intervention are deeply intertwined.

In June 2026, thirteen Canadian artists travelled to Kefalonia to explore the island's UNESCO Geopark and engage in conversations about climate change, ecological stewardship, and collective action. Through field research, site visits, workshops, and shared meals, the residency examined how artists can contribute to more sustainable models of community building while cultivating creative practices grounded in care, reciprocity, and environmental responsibility.

Working across the island, the artists visited significant ecological and cultural sites, including the Drogarati Cave, the Botanical Garden of Kefalonia, coastal wetlands, and Mediterranean shorelines. Together they explored endemic plant communities, collected seaweed along the Ionian coast to create dyes, processed pigments from local soils, and investigated the island's unique geological formations. These shared experiences became catalysts for new artistic research, inviting participants to engage directly with the material histories and ecological processes that shape the landscape.

The resulting works reflect on the interconnected relationships between people and the more-than-human world. They ask how geological time, botanical knowledge, relationship to space and collective care can inform new ways of understanding places and responding to environmental change. Rather than treating the landscape as a backdrop, Earthlings position it as an active collaborator, one that holds memory, resilience, and the potential for transformation.

Presented at The New Gallery, Earthlings invites audiences to consider how artistic practice can deepen ecological awareness through close observation, material experimentation, and acts of collective care. The exhibition creates a space to reflect on our shared responsibility to the environments we inhabit. Through opportunities for deep observation and connection, it invites audiences to imagine more sustainable ways of living, creating, and building community in the face of a rapidly changing climate.

Natasha Faye Jensen and Patrick Moskwa would like to thank Sophie Kagadis and Sophia Nanitsou at the Ionian Center for the Arts and Culture, Evi Matiatou from Cephalonia Botanica and Kefalonian Honey Michalatos for their generous support, knowledge and guidance.

The exhibition was generously supported by City of Calgary Micro Grant and The New Gallery.

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Josefina Rodriguez is a Canadian-Argentinian artist based in Calgary, Alberta (Treaty 7 Territory). She holds a BFA in Ceramics from the Alberta University of the Arts.

Rooted in her experiences growing up in Latin America—a region marked by patriarchal structures—Rodriguez’s practice explores the social and cultural forces that shape gender roles. Her work challenges the narrow, often one-dimensional narratives imposed on the female experience, and seeks to reclaim space for complexity, sensuality, and autonomy.

Through hand-built figurative ceramics and expressive drawings, Rodriguez invites viewers to engage with the themes of sensation, pleasure, and resistance as vital, humanizing forces. Her work celebrates the strength and beauty found in the unconventional, the unapologetic, and the rebellious aspects of womanhood.



Natasha Faye Jensen is a dual Canadian and United Kingdom interdisciplinary artist from Moh’kins’tsis (Calgary), located in Treaty 7 territory in Southern Alberta, Canada. Working across sculpture, collage, photography, and film, her research-driven practice examines the intersections of ecology, materiality, and colonial history, with a particular focus on cultivated landscapes as contested sites of power.

She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Alberta University of the Arts (formerly the Alberta College of Art and Design) in 2013 and completed a Master of Arts in Contemporary Art Practice at the Edinburgh College of Art in 2020. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions, screenings, and festivals across Canada, the United States, Finland, and the United Kingdom.

Jensen’s practice has been supported through grants from Calgary Arts Development, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and Creative Scotland. She is the recipient of several awards, including the RSA Barns-Graham Travel Award (2020), the RBC Emerging Artist Award from the Mayor’s Lunch for Arts Champion and Visual Artist and Craft Maker Award from Creative Scotland.



Karine Locatelli lives in the region of Charlevoix in Quebec, Canada. Through the representation of landscapes in drawing, she continues the pleinariste tradition distinctive of her region. She has held more than thirty collective or solo exhibitions and artist residencies in Canada, Portugal, and France. Her works can be found in public and private collections, including those of the Musée d'art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul, the David Suzuki Foundation, the city of Lévis, the TD Bank of Toronto, and Hydro-Québec.

Locatelli’s work primarily concerns the representation of landscapes in drawing. She seeks for it to convey a multidisciplinary character, by combining different artistic disciplines during its creation and presentation. As such, she aims to revisit the pictorial nature of drawing and photography and push these mediums further without taking for granted a traditional wall-mounted and framed exhibition technique. Her works can be presented through installative, sculptural, pictorial or interactive means, or even conceived through a collaborative approach with artists from different disciplines. She starts by observing nature, which she then documents in small drawings in my notebooks. Live drawing is an essential step in accurately capturing a moment and maintaining a sincere and affectionate relationship with one’s environment. Fishing, hiking, foraging, and sailing are ways to have a sensitive relationship with nature, in turn allowing one to be successful in representing it.



Nick Johnson is a writer, director, producer and cartoonist. Born and raised in Calgary AB, the craft of storytelling has led him to work in e-learning, children's books, film, animation, and comic books. He has an Illustration Degree from Alberta University of the Arts and a Masters in Comics and Graphic Novels from University of Dundee, Scotland. He is the writer, director and producer of the animated feature film SUNBURNT UNICORN which made its World Premiere at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in 2024 and is now streaming on Amazon Prime and YouTube. He teaches illustration and storytelling at AUArts and finds inspiration in CanLit, horror, X-Men, Proust and the ghosts of Utopia.



Sarah Slaughter is a Canadian artist, illustrator, muralist, and designer based in Calgary, Alberta, on Treaty 7 territory. Her artistic practice is centred on the creation of murals and site-specific artwork, transforming architectural surfaces into immersive visual experiences. Using bold linework and visual storytelling, she creates work that responds to the history, movement, and atmosphere of a location.

Influenced by graphic novels, printmaking, and contemporary street art, Sarah's work explores the transformation of everyday environments through art. Her murals transform underutilised infrastructure into visual landmarks that encourage curiosity and moments of pause.

As well as working in mural art, Sarah has expanded her professional portfolio to include branding, signage, and commercial design. She collaborates with businesses and organisations to create visually distinctive artwork that strengthens their identity and presence.



Aiming to create atmospheres of uncertainty, Sean Jena Taal blurs the dichotomy between comfort and discomfort, real and imagined, observed and observer. Meticulously detailed graphite drawings render fictionalized spaces of psycho-karstology that question what’s looking back from the depths and what forms grow in hostile spaces. The drawings focus on exploring caves as psychological landscapes of living beings through pareidolia, water reflections, and wrapping stone in camouflage fabrics.

Sean Jena Taal is a visual artist from Mohkinstsis/Calgary. He received a BFA in Drawing from Alberta University of the Arts in 2015 and, in 2012, attended the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design residency program in New York. In 2022, Taal participated in the Gil Artist Residency, followed by a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in 2023.

Recent solo exhibitions include Witch’s Fingers at Southern Alberta Art Gallery in 2023 and Shadow of the Hollow at Norberg Hall in 2024. He has also participated in group exhibitions including a recent presentation at Pale Fire, Vancouver, BC. Taal’s second solo exhibition with Norberg Hall is scheduled to open in May 2026. His work is held in public and private collections, including the collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.



Rocío Graham is a Mexican Cahita multidisciplinary artist, arts administrator, writer, certified Death Doula, and Grief Coach based on the traditional lands of the Sinixt people in British Columbia, Canada. Holding a Bachelor of Design in Photography from the Alberta University of the Arts, Graham’s practice explores decolonization, ecofeminism, and the intersections of community, nature, spirituality, and collective healing.

Drawing from Indigenous knowledge systems, life-cycle rituals, and their work as a curandera, death doula, and grief coach, Graham creates work that fosters deeper connections to nature, ancestry, and the cyclical processes of life and death. Their multidisciplinary practice examines how personal and collective healing can emerge through reconnection with the natural world.

Graham is the Director of the Santa Rosa Arts Residency Program and the Boundary Mushroom Festival. They have led artist residencies at the Alberta University of the Arts and Santa Rosa Arts, facilitating decolonial artistic practices and cultivating intimate relationships with place and ecology.

Their writing and critical reflections have been published nationally and internationally in Luma Quarterly, PhotoED Magazine, SNAPline, Yolkless Press, Articulate Magazine, WSG Blog, and Rungh Magazine. Graham has served as a juror for the Eldon + Anne Foote Edmonton Visual Arts Prize and the ATB Powering Possibility Through the Arts program, and regularly curates exhibitions and artistic projects throughout British Columbia.



Patrick Moskwa is a practicing designer, artist, educator, and storyteller on Treaty 7 territory in Calgary Alberta. He is enchanted by the stories objects hold and how they share those with us, particularly how those histories are narrated through the object into the space that surrounds it. Through soft sculpture, Patrick conveys the ghosts of these objects and invites the viewer to consider the traces we leave in places we’ve been.



Kelly Isaak is a Calgary-based artist whose practice centers on drawing through photographic and material processes. Informed by a feminist perspective and the female gaze, her work examines intimacy, connection, and the ethics of representation, emphasizing care and consent in her collaborations with and through the relationships she forms with those she depicts.

She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Alberta College of Art and Design, now Alberta University of the Arts, and a Bachelor of Education from the University of Calgary. Alongside her studio practice, she teaches visual arts in a Calgary high school and is an instructor in Continuing Education at the Alberta University of the Arts.

Her work has been exhibited in Canada and the United States and has been recognized with grants from Calgary Arts Development, as a finalist in the Kingston Prize, and with an Honourable Mention in the People’s Portrait Prize. She has participated in an international residency at Château Orquevaux in France and an upcoming research residency at the Ionian Center for the Arts and Culture in Kefalonia, Greece.n She is a studio member at NVRLND. Studios and a former member of the Fem Assembly.  She was part of the RBC Emerging Artist cohort (2023–2024) and her work has been published in Arts to Hearts Magazine, Issue #6.



Avery Fisher is an interdisciplinary artist with a practice anchored in jewellery and metals. Currently studying for their BFA, their practice shifts continuously, influenced by their course work and personal research into craft processes. Their past works hold a critical lens to social issues such as gender normativity, and queer experiences. Avery's current research has led them to focus on the ephemeral aspects of childlike wonder, indulging in acts of risk and play to foster curiosity and re-engage with their inner child.