April 29 – May 31, 2025
Artist in Residence Kayla St-Pierre’s
“Finding Community“
Artist Talk and Closing Reception:
Saturday, May 31 from 2–4 pm
Sponsored by
Artist statement
Connection is something invisible.
There are ties that route through each of us and flow through the air; intangible, and yet impossible to cut. A line that draws from one person to another, and to that person’s people, and to the people beyond that.
Connections can be as soft and beautiful as they can be frayed and damaged. Within this network of lines, a patchwork of people can be roughly defined as a community. We’re all a part of different communities; personal, heritage, recreation, and geographic. We often think of the city or the town or the village that we live in as our community.
But what about the passing stranger who takes a moment to exist in a new place, stepping into an already-defined group? Can you blend into an existing framework of people, with their standards and culture and customs? How do you know that you’re a part of something? As an artist, these are the questions on my mind as I step into a new town to inhabit the Art Gallery of Bancroft and produce a body of work.
My paintings explore the relationship between representation and abstraction.
About the artist
Kayla St-Pierre is a recent graduate of Guelph’s Studio Art major. As someone with a limited visual memory, she is particularly interested in what it means to reconnect with past experiences. St-Pierre manipulates photos that she’s taken to use as references for her detailed oil paintings. Her work leans into a territory best described as “found abstract.” Through the exploration natural reflections found in windows or in water, the subject is distorted, thus complicating the full image. St-Pierre has grown fond of saturated, bright colours, leaning more toward a cool-toned and unnatural palette.
She participated in the Guelph Emerging Artists program in 2022 that led to an exhibition at Boarding House Gallery. She has since exhibited her work at Lalani Jennings Contemporary Gallery and University of Guelph’s Zavitz Gallery, in group exhibitions. In March 2024, Zavitz Gallery mounted a solo exhibition of her work, “Oh, is this your first life, too?” In April 2024 St-Pierre was one of four students chosen to represent University of Guelph’s Studio Art Program at Toronto’s Artist Project.
