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December 24: 10 AM-3 PM  
December 25: Closed  
December 26: 10 AM-5 PM  
December 31: 10 AM-3 PM  
January 1: Closed  

The Gallery is open for its Fall 2022 season from October 1 to December 31, 2022.

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The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and the RBC Foundation are thrilled to launch the second edition of the RBC Emerging Artist Network with the announcement of its 25 participants. 

The Network includes a robust calendar of engaging programs that spans eight months. It was developed to provide dynamic professional development opportunities for local artists, creating new ways for them to meet, exchange, learn and take advantage of The Power Plant’s diverse resources for mentorship, networking with exhibiting artists, as well as guest speakers and arts professionals. 

The Power Plant’s RBC Emerging Artist Network, supported by the RBC Foundation through RBC Emerging Artists program, continues to build bridges for the future by connecting emerging artists with established artists and arts professionals via mentorship, training, networking, and professional development opportunities. The aim of the program is to assist emerging artists to advance their careers in ways that are appropriate to The Power Plant’s mandate as a non-collecting, contemporary art institution. In addition to studio visits and constructive workshops with The Power Plant’s team, the emerging artists will be connected with thought-leaders in the arts community. The program encourages a broad range of skill-building, from talks by leading private art collectors, conservationists, and commercial galleries, to workshops on financial planning and grant writing. 

Participants will also receive a year-long membership that gives access to members’ events, including exhibition previews and tours, discounts on publications, editions, and merchandise from The Power Plant’s Shop, and free entry to museums and galleries across North America. 

The participants of the RBC Emerging Artist Network 2022 are: Allison Morris, Amanda Kung, Ayan Melikli, Chantal Khoury, Christina Trutiak, Claire Heidinger, EMKAY, Gladys Lou, Hajar Moradi, Heidi Holmes, James Rollo, Jill Smith, Joel Rodriguez, Kassandra Walters, Lingxiang Wu, Mahsa Alikhani, Malik McKoy, mihyun maria kim, Nora Rosenthal, Olivia Brouwer, Paula McLean, Ramolen Laruan, Sara Vargas Nessi, Soka Rodriguez, and Vladimir Kanic. 

“We are excited to continue this meaningful partnership with the RBC Foundation to support and develop emerging Canadian artists. The finalists showcase diverse practices and perspectives that are reflective of the current art and cultural landscape in Ontario. The Power Plant is committed in its support of local emerging artists through the RBC Emerging Artist Network, and in our exhibitions and public programs.” — Carolyn Vesely, Interim Director, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery.

Learn more about RBC Emerging Artist Network [here](https://the-power-plant.vercel.app/whats-on/rbc-emerging-artist-network-program).

[Learn more](https://the-power-plant.vercel.app/whats-on/rbc-emerging-artist-network-program) about RBC Emerging Artist Network .

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25 visual artists from across Ontario were chosen to take part in this eight-month long program at The Power Plant

The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery Announces
Participants in the RBC Emerging Artist Network 2022-23

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Throughout his long career, Cree curator and artist Gerald McMaster has kept notebooks as convenient places to record thoughts, compose texts and make sketches.

There are about 70 of them now showing at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, part of a small display to acknowledge McMaster’s recent honour: a Governor General’s Award in visual and media arts. A few of the notebooks are open to show pages of dense writing and precise drawings of faces, bodies and a series of moccasins, alongside his notations. “It’s my curatorial life on display through these notebooks. Writing and drawing were so synonymous for me, just putting something on paper,” McMaster said in a recent interview.  
  
Writing and drawing – or language and image – are also closely linked in his critical thinking, as he has worked to establish an Indigenous approach to seeing and showing art. “Language helps us to conceptualize the world,” said McMaster, who grew up speaking Plains Cree on the Red Pheasant First Nation reserve in Saskatchewan.  

“We see the world through this linguistic lens. And so if we’re speaking English and learning only Western art history, we are going to see the world through that lens. The work that I’ve been doing is to try to go back to original languages to see what’s in them.” This philosophy can have very practical implications. At the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, where McMaster recently retired from teaching, it means courses in Canadian art start long before Europeans arrived.  
  
“If you come to Canada, it is an Indigenous lens through which you are going to be seeing, and being presented with. I think that’s the direction which we’ve been moving toward. It’s exciting because it’s much richer.”  
And it can have critical implications. McMaster had always thought the Cree word, tapasinahike, which he had known since childhood, just meant “drawing.” But researching the language as an adult, he realized there were subtleties not contained in the English translation. Tapasinahike might be better translated as making a truthful mark or doing something in a truthful way.
  
**[Read the full article at The Globe And Mail](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/arts/art-and-architecture/article-cree-curator-gerald-mcmaster-reflects-on-how-an-indigenous-lens-can/).**

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Cree curator Gerald McMaster reflects on how an Indigenous lens can change how we see art

Still from Meriem Bennani, Guided Tour of a Spill (CAPSInterlude), 2021. Courtesy the artist and François Ghebaly

The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery is excited to announce its partnership with Vega Foundation for the presentation of two moving image works by Morocco-born, New York–based Meriem Bennani as part of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Wavelengths program. On view every day between September 9 and 18, The Power Plant invites the public to experience the Canadian premiere of Bennani’s works for free.

Bennani’s Life on the CAPS, 2018–22, and her collaborative project with Orian Barki, 2 Lizards, 2020, question contemporary society and its fractured systems, individual identity, and the ubiquitous dominance of digital technologies. Using live-action footage, computer-generated animation, and special effects, her videos mix visual references drawn from reality television, advertising, music videos, phone recordings, documentary, and science fiction. Set in a supernatural, dystopian future, the trilogy Life on the CAPS (short for “capsule”) features a fictional island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. In the world of the CAPS, teleportation has replaced air travel, and displaced populations utilize this mode of transportation to cross oceans and borders. Enclosed by a magnetic shield, the CAPS houses migrants who have been caught teleporting illegally. 

Settled into bustling enclaves, citizens of the CAPS have developed their own hybrid culture and modes of defiance in opposition to the US troops that patrol the island. 2 Lizards reflects the unfolding realities of the COVD-19 pandemic in real time. Each roughly three-minute episode illustrates the mundanities of quarantine life: rooftop hangouts, Zoom birthdays, the 7 PM clap for essential workers, the thrill of breaking social-distancing rules with a new lover. The process of Bennani and her collaborator Orian Barki was mostly inspired by their daily events and conversations with friends, whose viewpoints are included in the series through a cast of animated characters. 

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The Power Plant Partners with Vega Foundation to Present the Work of Meriem Bennani at the Toronto International Film Festival

The Power Plant Partners with Vega Foundation to Present
the Work of Meriem Bennani at the Toronto International
Film Festival

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Discover The Power Plant Archives

The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery spotlights contemporary indigenous artists from the circumpolar Arctic and the Amazon.

Arctic/Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity

On view 

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Welcome to The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery

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Give the gift of art

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Join us for a Sunday Scene with writer and researched Carmen Victor.

Carmen Victor has a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture from York and Toronto Metropolitan Universities. Victor’s writing on contested landscapes, installation art, cinemas of the circumpolar North, and time-based and experimental film & media has appeared in several journals and edited volumes. She has writing forthcoming in Papers in Canadian History and Environment (late fall 2022). Victor teaches at universities in and around the Greater Toronto Area, currently in the Faculty of Arts & Science at OCAD University. She holds a MITACS Accelerate Postdoctoral Fellowship in Cinema and Media Arts at York University and is Managing Editor of PUBLIC journal.

Sunday Scene

Speakers from the world of art and beyond offer their responses to the current exhibitions. Whether focusing on a single work/artist or on multiple exhibitions, guest presenters draw provocative connections between our programs and broader cultural and intellectual debates.

Join us for a Sunday Scene with writer and researched Carmen Victor.

Carmen Victor has a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture from York and Toronto Metropolitan Universities. Victor’s writing on contested landscapes, installation art, cinemas of the circumpolar North, and time-based and experimental film & media has appeared in several journals and edited volumes. She has writing forthcoming in Papers in Canadian History and Environment (late fall 2022). Victor teaches at universities in and around the Greater Toronto Area, currently in the Faculty of Arts & Science at OCAD University. She holds a MITACS Accelerate Postdoctoral Fellowship in Cinema and Media Arts at York University and is Managing Editor of PUBLIC journal.


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Sunday Scene with Carmen Victor

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We invite kids and families to join this Power Kids workshop called Print/Pattern!

After a tour of the North Gallery, focusing on Yanomami’s culture of body painting, inspired by Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe’s drawings in the North Gallery, families will design their symbols and use printmaking techniques to reproduce them. Participants will create a poster of their own symbols by the end of the artmaking activity.



Power Kids

Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe is an Indigenous Yanomami artist from Sheroana, a small community of the Upper Orinoco River in the Venezuelan Amazon. Working primarily with drawing and handmade papers crafted from native fibers, he draws from his ancestral knowledge of the signs and symbols of Yanomami culture, and their application in basketry and body painting for ritual ceremonies. 

Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe is an Indigenous Yanomami artist from Sheroana, a small community of the Upper Orinoco River in the Venezuelan Amazon. Working primarily with drawing and handmade papers crafted from native fibers, he draws from his ancestral knowledge of the signs and symbols of Yanomami culture, and their application in basketry and body painting for ritual ceremonies. While such practices are female in Yanomami culture, he has consciously recovered these motifs to build his visual lexicon. Hakihiiwe’s work is a very personal interpretation of Yanomami tradition and identity; his drawings and paintings speak to his rites and beliefs, observations of the jungle and concern for the ecosystem.

Hakihiiwe was born in Amazonas, Venezuela. He began making art in the 1990s when he met Mexican artist Laura Anderson Barbata. Barbata introduced Hakihiiwe to the practice of making paper from native plant fibres like Shiki and Abaca. Hakihiiwe began to draw and paint on the handmade paper using vegetable ink. His drawings generally depicted a range of abstract shapes, lines, or grids suggestive of the flora and fauna of the Amazon rainforest.
In 1992, Hakihiiwe collaborated with Barbata to establish the Yanomami Owëmamotima Community Project. The project enabled the publication of written and illustrated books made from the collective experience of the Yanomami people.

When Hakihiiwe is in his native environment of the Amazon, he has no communication beyond his tribe's territory. While in the rainforest, Hakihiiwe draws and sketches in a notebook, where he develops a unique system of visual communication. When he travels to Caracas, he translates his illustrations into paintings and screen-prints on fabric or paper.
Hakihiiwe's artwork is minimal and abstract, adopting a reduced colour palette. His work is often viewed as an archive in development because he makes transient cultural traditions permanent. Hakihiiwe's work depicts patterns used in body painting and illustrates ancestral and mythological narratives from Yanomami culture.



The Power Plant invites families to join our free Power Kids program, happening on selected Sundays at 3 PM!
Led by our talented Power Kids Coordinator Niloufal Salimi, each workshop starts with a brief exhibition tour and continues with a fun art-making activity. Each event is uniquely inspired by one of the topics presented in current exhibitions and features a particular type of craft. Provided with all nesessary arts supplies, participants are guided by the coordinator to 

Power Kids is a series of free art-making workshops for children ages 7–12, led by skilled and dynamic artist-educators. Each workshop is inspired by a different idea or concept featured in our current exhibitions.


Join us for a Print/Pattern kids workshop inspired by Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe’s drawings!

After a tour of the North Gallery, focusing on Yanomami’s culture of body painting, inspired by Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe’s drawing in the North Gallery, families will design their symbols and use printmaking techniques to reproduce them. Families will create a poster of their symbols by the end of the artmaking activity.

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Power Kids: Print/Pattern

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Join us for a Sunday Scene with writer and researched Jananda Lima! Jananda will be presenting her perspective on two artworks: Olinda Reshinjabe Silvano, Wilma Raynas, and Ronin Koshi’s murals and Couzyn van Heuvelen's installation. These works will guide the audience in understanding the Indigenous concept of relationality, in which life, knowledge, and being are a manifestation of relationships between humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans.  
  
Jananda Lima is a sessional professor at the School of Graduate Studies at OCAD University and a researcher at the Wapatah Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge, where she acts as the Indigenous Amazonian Artist Liaison. As an academic, her research in social design involves fieldwork in radically marginalized territories. As a futures designer, she focuses on reclaiming design for decolonial world-making. Jananda co-founded the Medio Xingu Observatory, which proposes a partnership between Indigenous and academic knowledge, using cartography to generate counter-narratives. She is also a member of the Reimagining Wealth Initiative, which aims to create exchange flows otherwise, supporting shared value resources and knowledge. Currently, Jananda is Rosi Waikhon’s mentee as part of an OCADU and Canada Council of Arts initiative to support BIPOC artists.  



Join us for a Sunday Scene with writer and researched Jananda Lima! Jananda will be presenting her perspective on two artworks: Olinda Reshinjabe Silvano, Wilma Raynas, and Ronin Koshi’s murals and Couzyn van Heuvelen's installation. These works will guide the audience in understanding the Indigenous concept of relationality, in which life, knowledge, and being are a manifestation of relationships between humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans.

Jananda Lima is a sessional professor at the School of Graduate Studies at OCAD University and a researcher at the Wapatah Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge, where she acts as the Indigenous Amazonian Artist Liaison. As an academic, her research in social design involves fieldwork in radically marginalized territories. As a futures designer, she focuses on reclaiming design for decolonial world-making. Jananda co-founded the Medio Xingu Observatory, which proposes a partnership between Indigenous and academic knowledge, using cartography to generate counter-narratives. She is also a member of the Reimagining Wealth Initiative, which aims to create exchange flows otherwise, supporting shared value resources and knowledge. Currently, Jananda is Rosi Waikhon’s mentee as part of an OCADU and Canada Council of Arts initiative to support BIPOC artists.

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Sunday Scene with Jananda Lima

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Inspired by Olinda Silvano’s mural, participants will design patterns on graph paper and weave papers based on their designs.  
  
Olinda Reshinjabe Silvano is an Indigenous Shipibo-Konibo artist from Peru. In her practice Olinda works with ancestral Shibipo-Konibo technique of kené, traditionally expressed through music, weaving, or drawing. Across her work, Silvano references el Ronín, a divine anaconda who is the creator of the earth and water, and whose geometric patterns inspired kené art. Cosmic worldviews and creation stories are accompanied by icaros—healing and ritualistic songs, one of which you can hear here, sung by Olinda herself to bring kené designs to life.

Olinda Reshinjabe Silvano is an Indigenous Shipibo-Konibo artist from Peru, utilizing traditional art of kené in her creative practice. Her art targets an urban audience but brings into the city the power given her by the plants that she herself received as a child.


Olinda Reshinjabe Silvano is an Indigenous Shipibo-Konibo artist from Peru, utilizing traditional art of kené in her creative practice.

Olinda Silvano Inuma grew up in the Native Community of Paohyan on the banks of the Ucayali River. She belongs to the Shipibo-Konibo people, one of the most numerous indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Amazon. She was born at seven months, frail and small. Her grandfather then breathed medicinal plants into her body to strengthen her and placed an invisible crown of kene designs on her head, to endow her with the gift of vision. The plants and medicinal visions not only fortified her health but her will. This visionary ability has accompanied her throughout her life and guided her defence of the Amazon with the power of the luminous designs she received from her ancestors.  As a child she lived in intimate familiarity with forest and rivers and learned how to paint and embroider beautiful fabrics covered with kene designs; but she could not complete her schooling because her parents had no money. So, at the age of 15, she travelled to the city of Pucallpa to look for work. With the first payment she earned, she bought a yellow shirt she had promised to take to her father as proof of her determination to succeed in the city.  She soon formed her own family and migrated to Lima, the capital, looking for better education conditions for her children.

In Lima, she built a precarious house in a dump on the banks of the polluted Rimac River, founding with other Shipibo-Konibo families the urban community of Cantagallo.  For many years, she would go out into the streets of the city to offer her kene embroidery to the passers-by, walking the entire day to bring home a small sustenance. At last, in 2014 she was able to show her works in an art gallery. Olinda has achieved national and international recognition for her colourful embroidery, paintings and murals of extraordinary beauty and light.  Her art targets an urban audience but brings into the city the power given her by the plants that she herself received as a child.

Kene lines are not mere abstract geometric graphics; they are the materialization of the koshi force of plants and their ibo, the spiritual owners of the forest, which visionary women, like Olinda, see in their minds and show in their works. The meshes of kene give rise to perceptions in synesthesia, where hearing, smell and touch join in the vision of designs, generating associations between the landscape of the forest and the embroidered and painted paths of designs. For Olinda, her work as a contemporary Shipibo-Konibo artist is a powerful form of activism that uses another language, the language of plants, to fight against discrimination and to defend the Amazon and its peoples from within the hardcore of city life.

In this exciting workshop inspired by Olinda Silvano’s colourful mural, participants will design patterns on graph paper and weave papers based on their designs.

Olinda Reshinjabe Silvano is an Indigenous Shipibo-Konibo artist from Peru. In her practice Olinda works with ancestral Shibipo-Konibo technique of kené, traditionally expressed through music, weaving, or drawing. Across her work, Silvano references el Ronín, a divine anaconda who is the creator of the earth and water, and whose geometric patterns inspired kené art. Cosmic worldviews and creation stories are accompanied by icaros—healing and ritualistic songs, one of which you can hear here, sung by Olinda herself to bring kené designs to life.Inspired by Olinda Silvano’s mural, participants will design patterns on graph paper and weave papers based on their designs.

The Power Plant

Welcome to The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery

On view

Arctic/Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity

Upcoming Events

Sunday Scene with Carmen Victor

Power Kids: Print/Pattern

Sunday Scene with Jananda Lima

Power Kids: Woven Paper

Give the gift of art

Discover The Power Plant Archives

About The Power Plant

News

The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery Announces Participants in the RBC Emerging Artist Network 2022-23

Cree curator Gerald McMaster reflects on how an Indigenous lens can change how we see art

The Power Plant Partners with Vega Foundation to Present the Work of Meriem Bennani at the Toronto International Film Festival

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