Caldera

Caldera features the five winning artworks of the 2025 Emerging Digital Artists Award as part of the MacKenzie Art Gallery’s experimental digital exhibition series. These emerging artists engage with themes of yearning, memory and dislocation to envision speculative futures that resist contemporary political trajectories. Through digitally-rendered objects, game design, photogrammetry, and immersive reality techniques, they create environments that help us envision our precarious present as a site of potential and possibility.

The award-winning works are presented within an abandoned luxury spa located in the caldera of a volcano – a large cauldron-like hollow that forms shortly after the emptying of a magma chamber during a volcanic eruption. Within this imagined environment created by 2025 EDAA featured artist Adrienne Matheuszik, the exhibition serves as a visual metaphor for the shared experience of seeking reprieve from a world brimming with volatility. Through the lens of digital art, the artists offer us a glimpse of possible pathways through destruction and loss towards transformation.

Caldera is curated by Shannon Linde (Senior Curator, EQ Bank) and Lillian O’Brien Davis (Associate Curator, MacKenzie Art Gallery), and funded by the Canada Council for the Art’s Digital Strategy Fund, MacKenzie Art Gallery, and EQ Bank.

Image credit: Adrienne Matheuszik, Caldera, 2025 

Eva Grant | Eva Grant is a St̓át̓imc-Eurasian filmmaker, writer and artist based in BC whose work is grounded in archive, interface, and ecology. She has held fellowships and residencies through the Sundance Institute, imagineNATIVE, Artengine, the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. A technological Trickster of the Indigital realm, she prototypes near-worlds, capacious futures, and their imagined implements. She
studied philosophy and literature at Stanford University and is the founder of Tooth & Nail Pictures.

Alex Gibson | Alex is a Barbadian Canadian interdisciplinary artist based on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver, BC). They use images and archives as sites to examine queer spaces, temporalities, and architectures. Gibson holds an MFA from UBC, and their work has been exhibited in Barbados, Canada, Italy, Poland, and the United States.

Cadin Londono | Cadin is a Colombian game developer born in Medellin, Colombia and based in Tio’Tia:ke (Montreal). His interest in coding began from a young age, watching his father code his own games in his free time. Cadin released his first videogame at age eighteen and is now busy creating videogames that look at life through an anticolonial lens. He holds a BA from McGill University with a major in Computer Science and a minor in Philosophy.

Laura Caraballo | Laura is an interdisciplinary artist born in Bacatá [Bogotá] and based in Tiohtià:ke [Montréal]. Her work uses technology to reimagine and create interactive, sensorial physical and virtual spaces that revisit the past and question its role in shaping Latinx futurist aesthetics and narratives. Laura is particularly interested in how we shape, and are shaped by, the spaces we inhabit within a temporal context, while exploring themes of home, memory, and consciousness.

Kahani Ploessl | Kahani (कहानी) is a dimension-bending tech artist based in Markham, ON. Her work in generative, videogame, and installation art explores notions of the glitch and digital spiritualism. Guided by her Indian heritage, Kahani draws parallels between the cosmic philosophy of Hinduism and the pixelated manifestations of digital realms and avatar bodies. Her work considers the glitch as a purposeful gesture that can push our digital experiences away from their current structures and functions into experimental and transformative models for being.

Presented in partnership with: