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.
About the MacKenzie Art Gallery:
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.
About the Developers:
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.
About the 2025 EDAA Featured Artist:
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.
About the Emerging Digital Artists Award:
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.
About EQ Bank:
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.