2025 MFA Exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Guelph

Featuring graduating students from the School of Fine Art and Music, University of Guelph

This spring, the Art Gallery of Guelph is pleased to present four exhibitions showcasing the work of MFA candidates from the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph. Offering a dynamic investigation of contemporary artistic practice, these projects reflect a breadth of material approaches, conceptual inquiries, and critical perspectives. Each exhibition invites audiences to engage with innovative work that explores forms of knowledge, expands dialogue, and contributes to the evolving landscape of contemporary art.

Representing the culmination of two years of work in the MFA program, this series is presented by the Art Gallery of Guelph in partnership with the School of Fine Art and Music as well as the College of Arts at the University of Guelph.

Stephanie Fortin, 43° 34′ 0.282″ N, 80° 4′ 23.86″ W and 43° 34′ 0.162″ N, 80° 4′ 23.73″ W (installation view; foreground and background), 2024, silk, rust, acetic acid, 142.2 x 175.3 cm and 142.2 x 182.9 cm. Photo: Catherine Chan

The Weight of Stains, The Wait of Time
Stephanie Fortin

April 2 – 6, 2025

At the heart of Stephanie Fortin’s practice is an ethical inquiry: is it necessary—or responsible—to aestheticize waste in the context of global exploitation and climate change? Engaging with forms and sites at the fringes of development—from the trees of urban forests to the industrial ruins of salvage yards—she examines how their surfaces reveal the entanglement of human activity and ecological systems. During the summer of 2024, Fortin developed her approach in situ at a wrecking yard, “recovering” rusted car hoods through a distinctive transfer process. Placing reclaimed silk over the corroded metal and applying acetic acid, rust—acting as both residue and pigment—was lifted onto the textile as the reaction unfolded.

Aiming beyond documentation, Fortin’s practice engages with time, climate, and intervention, exposing the socio-political histories embedded within her chosen media. Throughout her work, materiality, pigment, and process converge to confront the affective potential of such encounters, drawing attention to the subconscious and visceral responses they evoke. In doing so, she challenges viewers to reconsider how spaces and objects deemed obsolete continue to shape both the present and future.

The artist extends gratitude to Mclean’s Auto Wreckers and Paloma Blanca for their generous support of this project.

Hal Fortin, Accumulation (detail), 2025, found windows and pencil crayon on rag paper, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

I am a Handyman
Hal Fortin

April 10 – 15, 2025

What utility can we find in vestiges of the past? This question shapes Hal Fortin’s interdisciplinary practice and its distinct sculptural language, punctuated by humour, dream logic, and the rhythms of domestic labour. Working with second-hand materials that are both inherited and found, Fortin moves fluidly between repurposing originals into sculptures and reproducing them through printmaking. Responding to surfaces marked by time and absence—stained, mended, cleaned, sanded, shedding, scraped, pierced, and peeling—the exhibition repositions objects as sites where histories accumulate, revealing both care and neglect.

An assemblage of unstable forms, the would-be furnishings and tools that comprise I am a Handyman are as strange as they are familiar. While they relate to the body at the domestic scale, they unsettle expectations of function, deflating under the pressure of usefulness. In the process, Fortin’s work considers our shared fate with objects and invites viewers to reflect on their relationships with everyday materials.

Bahar Enshaeian, Quiet Unfolding (installation view), 2025, inkjet prints on heavyweight bond paper and varied objects, 61 × 78.7 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Quiet Unfolding
Bahar Enshaeian

April 24 – 29, 2025

Through photography, Bahar Enshaeian unravels the intricate layers of memory, identity, and belonging. Rooted in personal experience, her work speaks to the complexities of migration, displacement, and the search for home. Blending photographs with ephemeral objects, Enshaeian creates a rich narrative that traces the emotional and cultural currents of life between Iran and Canada—glimpses of fleeting moments, intimate spaces, and evolving relationships that reveal how memory takes shape within and between movement and distance.

Language plays a central role in her practice; Persian and English exist alongside one another, marking the duality of her experience. Weaving together her personal story with broader, shared narratives of migration, Enshaeian’s work forges a space between the deeply personal and the universally resonant. Transcending records of time and place, her photographs become meditations on longing, adaptation, and the ways in which we construct a sense of belonging when “home” is no longer singular but expansive and fluid.

Natasha Verbeke, a mouth of water, 2025, oil on wood panel, 40.6 x 50.8 cm. Photo: LF Documentation

a shadow rolling down your back
Natasha Verbeke

May 3 – 8, 2025

Natasha Verbeke’s paintings of lush gardens and landscapes consider how their often violent histories of creation and occupation can be reimagined as sites of hope and renewal. Drawing from a sieve of art historical sources, she engages in a layered dialogue with the Western canon and its traditions of landscapes, turmoil, and drama—at once acknowledging the artistic proficiency of the “old masters” while critiquing the power structures that underpinned the creation of their work.

Moved by Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time, which offers a poetic and poignant reflection on how gardens may reveal paradoxical histories of care and destruction, opulence and oppression, Verbeke allows traces of this past to surface in contemporary painting. By disrupting subject matter from its original context, she unsettles and reconfigures fixed narratives, allowing historical fragments to take on new meaning in an evolving present.

Visit the Art Gallery of Guelph

The Art Gallery of Guelph is open from 12 to 5 pm, Tuesday through Sunday. All are welcome, and admission is free. Located at the edge of the University of Guelph campus, the gallery offers a dynamic space for visitors to engage with contemporary and historical artistic practices and research, explore diverse perspectives, and experience thought-provoking exhibitions. Through its commitment to fostering creative dialogue, AGG provides an accessible and inclusive environment where art connects communities and inspires new ways of seeing the world.

Art Gallery of Guelph
358 Gordon Street
Guelph, ON N1G 1Y1
Open Tuesday to Sunday, 12 – 5 pm | Accessible
519-837-0010
artgalleryofguelph.ca
info@artgalleryofguelph.ca
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