2024 RBC Emerging Artists in Residence
Art Windsor-Essex is proud to announce that Hrista Stefanova and Safa Youness will be our 2024 RBC Emerging Artists-in-Residence. Stefanova will be in residence at AWE between June 1 and August 15, 2024, and Youness between September 1 and November 30, 2024, with solo exhibitions at Dry Goods Gallery, located at 1012 Drouillard Road, following their residencies.
This year’s EAIRs were selected by jurors Jude Abu Zaineh, Nicole Baillargeon, and Sasha Opeiko from an open competition for emerging artists of all ages based in the Windsor-Essex region.
Art Windsor-Essex’s residency program is currently in its third year. Previous EAIRs include Alexandria Masse and Krystal Bigsky (2023), and Andrea Bresolin, Michael Khalil, and Maria Mediratta (2022). Since 2023, this program has been supported by the RBC Foundation’s Emerging Artist Project.
About the Artists:
Hrista Stefanova is a visual artist from Windsor, Ontario and a recent graduate of NSCAD University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Fine Art and Art History. Through printmaking, sculpture, and installation practices Stefanova explores themes of locality and memory, and how those themes are represented in objects and spaces. Stefanova has exhibited in galleries across Canada and internationally, and has created public projects in Halifax, NS and Charlottetown, PEI. Alongside several academic awards at NSCAD, Stefanova was also a finalist for the 2023 NSCAD Student Art Award for Printmaking. Stefanova has worked in the Anna Leonowens Gallery (where she has worked on projects such as Home Work: Lure of the Atlantic), Arts Council Windsor and Region, the Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje, and has been a figure drawing instructor in NSCAD’s Extended Studies program. In the fall of 2024, she will continue her studies at Concordia University pursuing a Masters of Fine Arts in Sculpture.
Safa Youness is a Palestinian-Canadian artist living in Windsor, Ontario. She focuses on creating stories through photography that captures the experience of Palestinian life in diaspora, specifically her family’s history of displacement in Lebanon. She uses photographs taken by her family members to showcase the struggles and resilience of her community, particularly in Ein El-Hilweh, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. She also uses acrylic paint on canvas to create personal pieces of art. Her work is a blend of the personal and political and aims to humanize the Palestinian refugee experience and raise awareness of their ongoing struggle for justice. As a Palestinian-Canadian, Safa’s identity is deeply ingrained in her art, and her pieces serve to preserve her heritage and share her family’s story with the world.
About the Jurors:
Jude Abu Zaineh is a Palestinian-Canadian interdisciplinary artist-curator working across art, food, science, and technology studies. Her work develops alternate archive practices and investigates themes of culture, displacement, storytelling, and diaspora, through de-colonial frameworks. She examines ideals of home and community influenced by her childhood and upbringing in Southwest Asia.
Abu Zaineh is the recipient of several awards including the 2020 William and Meredith Saunderson Prizes for Emerging Artists, and was one of the first selected artists to participate in a collaborative residency with the Ontario Science Centre and MOCA Toronto (Canada). Her works have been shown at Ireland Glass Biennale; Malta Society of Arts, Valletta, Malta; Cultivamos Cultura, São Luis, Portugal; Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia, Lisbon, Portugal; Centro de Cultura Digital, Mexico City, Mexico; SVA, NYC, USA; Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, USA; Forest City Gallery, London, Canada; Art Gallery of Windsor, Canada; Centre Culturel Canadien, Paris, France; Museum London, Canada; Museum of Glass, Washington, USA, and more.
Her work has been featured in VICE Arabia, PBS, NPR, across CBC Canada platforms, Canadian Art magazine, NEUES GLAS-NEW GLASS: art & architecture magazines, and on the cover of fuse: the Museum of Glass Magazine.
Abu Zaineh’s works can be found in the permanent collections of The Museum of Glass (USA), Art Windsor-Essex (Canada), The City of Windsor’s Public Art Commission (Canada), as well as private collections internationally.
She received an MFA from the University of Windsor (Canada) and is currently a Doctoral Fellow and PhD Candidate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (NY, USA).
Nicole Baillargeon is an architectural designer, small-scale developer, and artist. She is a director and co-founder of architecture and design practice Mean Studio. Nicole has an M.Arch from University of Toronto. He early career took form at the junction of art and architecture working closely with artists and in various gallery settings. In 2020, after returning to Windsor and re-developing an historic shop front in Ford City, Windsor, she initiated Dry Goods Gallery, a street-facing art space committed to providing an inclusive and community-focused space for emerging visual arts.
Sasha Opeiko is an artist currently based in London, ON. Her work explores intersections of artistic production, machine-oriented ontology, and new definitions of melancholy to explore the “dark” reality of objects in the context of late capitalism. She works in a variety of media including painting, video, installation and new media, using appropriation and remediation of found objects and fragments of visual culture. She holds a BFA from University of Windsor (2009) and an MFA from University of Victoria (2012). She is currently a PhD candidate in the Art and Visual Culture program at Western University. Her work has been exhibited widely at galleries such as McIntosh Gallery, Art Windsor-Essex, Artcite Inc., Thames Art Gallery, and Art Gallery of Peterborough and Manifest Gallery (Cincinnati, OH). She is a recipient of several grants, such as the Canada Council for the Arts Project Grant to Visual Artists (2015), the Ontario Arts Council’s Visual Artists: Emerging Grant (2016) and Visual Artists Creation Projects Grant (2019).
The 2024 RBC Emerging Artist in Residence is generously sponsored by the RBC Foundation’s Emerging Artist Project.
