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.
Artists may produce work intended to challenge audiences, and we believe in an artist’s right to creative expression. In all instances, we invite you to engage with this work through a lens of curiosity and respect.
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 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 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 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 (कहानी) Ploessl 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.
CALDERA is presented by the MacKenzie Art Gallery in partnership with EQ Bank and features works by the five recipients of the 2025 Emerging Digital Artists Award (EDAA): Alex Gibson, Cadin Londono, Eva Grant, Kahani Ploessl, and Laura Caraballo. The exhibition was produced by Cat Bluemke and Brendy Lehman based on the artwork Caldera by Adrienne Matheuszik, the 2025 EDAA Featured Artist.
CALDERA marks the fifth iteration of the MacKenzie Art Gallery’s experimental digital exhibition series, designed to provide live, practical, and conceptual testing utilising the Gallery’s Digital Exhibitions Toolkit and Art Installation Launcher (DETAIL). Conceptualized by Digital Exhibition Consultant Cat Bluemke and funded by the Canada Council for the Art’s Digital Strategy Fund, DETAIL initiative seeks to redefine the possibilities of digital platforms for showcasing artistic expression.
Located in Treaty 4 territory, the MacKenzie Art Gallery is Saskatchewan’s oldest public art gallery, with a fifty-year history of championing Indigenous art from Indigenous perspectives. The MacKenzie embraces its unique position within the Canadian and international art landscape, celebrating the diverse perspectives of all artists within the plains region and Canada. It has a focus on Indigenous and contemporary art, contextualized through select historic and international work.
Cat Bluemke is an artist working primarily in game design, expanded reality, and performance. Her work has been exhibited internationally with prominent institutions including Rhizome and the New Museum (2020) and the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018) as part of the American pavilion’s corollary exhibits. Recent exhibitions include LikeLike Gallery (2025), the Fotomuseum Winterthur (2024), the Milan Machinima Festival (2024), and the Singapore Art Museum (2023). As of publication, she is the Executive Director of the Centre for Art Tapes in K’jipuktuk (Halifax, NS).
Brendy Lehman is a neuroscientist, interactive media artist, and arts programmer based in Toronto, Canada. Their projects in biodata-driven software development, interactive installation, and game curation all aim to capture contexts of togetherness and help people connect with themselves, each other, and their natural environment in new and meaningful ways. They have worked at the Hand Eye Society, Muse: The Brain-sensing Headband and have had their work or workshops featured at the Venice International Film Festival (Immersive), A MAZE. / Berlin, MIT Media Lab, The Science of Consciousness, Resonite VR, InterAccess, and others.
Adrienne Matheuszik is a mixed Jamaican & settler-canadian interdisciplinary artist in Toronto. Adrienne has had unsupervised access to the internet since she was nine years old. She uses computers to make art — video, physical computing, creative coding & 3D design — which usually result in interactive installations, augmented and virtual reality, short film and video, and game art. Adrienne’s work explores ideas of representation & identity online and IRL. She is interested in speculative futures and using sci-fi to examine the possibility of the post-colonial.
The Emerging Digital Artists Award (EDAA) is Canada’s award for critical experimentation in digital media, proudly presented by EQ Bank. Established in 2015, the annual prize celebrates the contributions of early-career artists working exclusively in virtual space. Each year, we seek artwork submissions from across the country that push us in new directions and challenge us to see the world through a different screen.
EQ Bank is the digital banking platform launched in 2016 by Equitable Bank, Canada’s Challenger Bank™. As a future-ready financial institution, fostering innovation is at the heart of everything we do. We firmly believe in the benefits of open banking and continue to invest in technology to serve the changing financial needs of Canadians.
The exhibition is intended for desktop platforms only and not accessible via mobile. It is best experienced using Google Chrome; please ensure your browser is up to date before launching. The approximate load time is 5 minutes; if longer than 5 minutes, refresh your browser tab to reload.
