A Curated Experience Featuring Jessamyn Box, Susana Espinoza & Maria Munar: New Works and Reception

Born in Edmonton Alberta, Calgary based artist Jessamyn Box uses acrylic paint, marker, crayon, charcoal, ink and spray paint to create large, abstract works of art that are grounded in colour and explore the relationship and territory between objects and form.  Her work is a multifarious, dynamic fairy tale that forces the journey’s plot and resolution into the eye of the viewer.  

As a primarily self-taught painter, Box began her artistic journey at a young age with drumming and drama as her creative outlets. After studying Theatre Arts in college, Box found she was desperately craving colour and wanting to get her hands dirty, so she began experimenting with paint whenever possible.  Box now has artwork in personal and corporate collections around Canada and the United States.

Maria Munar is a Canadian/Colombian visual artist based out of Calgary, Alberta. She graduated with a Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts with a major in Media Arts from the Alberta University of the Arts 2017. She has exhibited at Banff Center for Arts and Creativity, Gibson Fine Arts, Arts Commons, and Marion Nicoll Gallery in Alberta. She has been the recipient of a Visual Arts and New Media Individual Project grant from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and has attended residencies Arts Commons and AU arts. She is currently working as a Senior Studio Artist at Critical Mass.

Maria's garden titled Naturaleza Muerta, consists of a series of sculptural collages that builds upon and abstracts the still-life genre, in which a fleeting moment of life is preserved and transformed.  Nature has been digitized, broken down, cut up, and buried under many Photoshop layers. These fragments are like seeds, and something special happens when they sprout from her Epson printer. Vibrant and organically formed layers of photographs are meticulously cut, layered, and intertwined to create her own garden of death-defying still-life collages.