Regina, Saskatchewan—January 28, 2026: The MacKenzie Art Gallery, in partnership with EQ Bank, is excited to announce the launch of Caldera, the 2025 Emerging Digital Artists Award (EDAA) virtual exhibition. Now in its 11th year, the EDAA is Canada’s award for critical experimentation in digital media.

The public launch of Caldera and Emerging Digital Artists Award ceremony takes place on Thursday, February 5, 2026, 5 PM CST/ 7 PM EST, via livestream; all artists will be (virtually) in attendance. The exhibition can be experienced on the MacKenzie website 24/7 until December 20, 2026.

Caldera features the five recipients 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 audiences 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 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.

The MacKenzie Art Gallery and EDAA share the goal of supporting interactive contemporary art experiences through means that are experimental, yet accessible. In launching our Digital Exhibition Toolkit in 2025, a resource that was instrumental in realizing both last year’s EDAA exhibition and this year’s iteration, we sought to provide tools and guidance that might otherwise seem cost-prohibitive or difficult to navigate for artists, curators, and institutions of all scales. More importantly, our intention was to encourage and inspire the next generation of artists who already possessed a visionary sense of the future they wanted to see themselves within.

Image credit: Adrienne Matheuszik, Caldera, 2025

 

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Eva Grant | Eva is a Queer, St̓át̓imc-Eurasian filmmaker, curator and new media artist based in Victoria, BC. Her world-building practice activates Land-based storytelling, research-creation and speculative design to prototype decolonial and capacious futures informed by disability justice, Indigenous ontologies and ecological sovereignty.

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.

Cadin Londono | Cadin is a Colombian game developer born in Medellin, Colombia and based in Tio’Tia:ke (Montréal, QC). His interest in coding began from a young age, watching his father code his own games in his free time.

Laura Caraballo | Laura is an interdisciplinary artist born in Bogotá and based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal, QC). Her work explores the use of technology to create interactive, sensorial physical and virtual spaces that represent and engage communities in meaningful conversations.

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.

ABOUT THE EDAA

The Emerging Digital Artists Award (EDAA) is Canada’s award for critical experimentation in digital media, proudly presented by EQ Bank. Launched in 2015, the EDAA has awarded over $200,000 to 64 artists and celebrated a range of screen-based practices, including video, animation, virtual reality, game art, and web art.

ABOUT EQ BANK

Equitable Bank has a clear mission to drive change in Canadian banking to enrich people’s lives. As Canada’s Challenger Bank™ and seventh largest bank by assets, it leverages technology to deliver exceptional personal and commercial banking experiences and services to nearly 780,000 customers and more than six million credit union members through its businesses. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of EQB Inc. (TSX: EQB), a leading digital financial services company with $138 billion in combined assets under management and administration (as of October 31, 2025). Through its digital EQ Bank platform (eqbank.ca), its customers have named it one of the top banks in Canada on the Forbes World’s Best Banks list since 2021.

ABOUT THE MACKENZIE

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.

MEDIA CONTACT

Allison Weed

Communications Manager

MacKenzie Art Gallery

aweed@mackenzie.art

 

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