The MacKenzie Art Gallery, in partnership with EQ Bank, is thrilled to launch Sedimentary Futures, a dynamic virtual exhibition featuring the five 2024 Emerging Digital Artists Award recipients. The EDAA is Canada’s award for critical experimentation in digital media, proudly celebrating its tenth year. 

Sedimentary Futures marks the fifth iteration of the MacKenzie Art Gallery’s experimental digital exhibition series—a series designed to provide live, practical, and conceptual testing alongside the development of 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.  

Across the cohort of 2024 award winners is a shared sense of how preservation and maintenance are woven through contemporary digital worldbuilding. Collectively, their efforts have the effect of presenting viewers with a sort of “digital bog.” Formed through pressure and strategies of collection, retention, and release, bogs can seem boundaryless. Equal parts composter and incubator, bogs create a territory for new life-forms to emerge through the act of breaking down what they inherit. Each award-winning work in this exhibition channels a kind of bog methodology, speaking to the role that resourcefulness and memory play in the future of digital practice.     

The MacKenzie Art Gallery and EDAA are naturally aligned in 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 to realizing the 2024 EDAA online exhibition, we wanted to share tools and guidance that might otherwise seem cost-prohibitive or opaque with audiences, artists, curators, and institutions of all scales. More importantly, we sought to encourage the next generation of artists who already possessed a visionary sense of the future they wanted to see themselves within.  

 

Artist Biographies: 

Moni Omubor is a Lagos-born visual artist and designer based in Lethbridge, Alberta. Her new media practice uses speculative fiction to explore the interconnectedness of Black diasporic realities and postcolonial Nigerian identity. She holds a B.Sc. in Architecture and an MFA in New Media from the University of Lethbridge and is a member of the Lethbridge-based Black art collective, We’re Here Too. 

Carmilla Sumantry is an interdisciplinary creative based in so-called Vancouver, with a background in industrial design, 3D art, and animation. Her practice explores the relationship between emerging creative technology and art through an existential lens informed by her second-generation Indonesian-Canadian heritage and queer identity. 

Studio Ekosi is Caeleigh and Keara Lightning, mixed Irish and Nehiyaw sisters based in Edmonton, Alberta. Caeleigh is a Two-Spirit artist and illustrator whose work explores themes of queerness and interconnectivity, and Keara is a PhD student at the University of Alberta, where she advocates for Indigenous-led scientific research. Together, they create narrative games about Indigenous futures. 

Quinn Hopkins is a Toronto-based artist working at the intersection of Urban Indigenous culture and new media, crafting a vibrant dialogue between Indigenous history, urban life, and futuristic visions. Rooted in Anishinaable-Métis traditions, he reimagines Indigenous iconography for the modern era. His digital creations and immersive installations have been presented at Evergreen Brick Works, Toronto; Thunder Bay Art Gallery; and Hart House at the University of Toronto. 

Francisco Gonzalez-Rosas (he/they) is a Chilean performance and new media artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Their practice explores existing and speculative crossovers between body and technology, emphasizing the politics of these encounters. Francisco holds an MFA in Intermedia from Concordia University, Montreal, and a BA in Acting from Finis Terrae University, Santiago, and their work has been included in exhibitions at Fondation Phi, Montreal; Centre Caravansérail, Rimouski; and Centre for Culture & Technology, Toronto. 

 

About the EDAA:

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.  

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.

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