University of Calgary 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition

Featuring Graduate Students at Nickle Galleries and SAIT

Remnant

August 1 – September 13, 2025
Closing Reception: September 11, 2025 5 – 7pm MT
Nickle at Noon Artist Talk: September 11, 12pm MT
Nickle Galleries, Calgary
Exhibition Information

(Left) Ryanna Kizan, Some Things Hurt More, 2024, Oil on Canvas, 48″ x 48″. Photo Courtesy of the Artist. (Right) Yekta Tarki, Visualizing the Pyrocene, The Wildfire Timeline: The Burning Moment, 2024, Acrylic, Color Pencil, Charcoal and Pastel on Canvas, 60″ x 96″. Photo by Cerys Davies.

Worn Lines: Healing Through the Marked Body
Ryanna Kizan

Worn Lines is an exploration of the intersections of women’s bodies, body image, and the transformative potential of tattooing. Through large-scale self-portraits, the work explores tattooing as both a personal and political act: a form of bodily authorship that resists the normative ideals of femininity. Tattoos become marks of agency and reparative care, inscribed on a body which has experienced body dysmorphia and societal scrutiny. The act of painting parallels tattooing in its intimacy and layering, offering a visual, feminist language for reclamation and becoming. Informed by autotheory and corporeal feminism, Worn Lines positions the body not as a passive surface, but as a site of resistance and repair.

Visualizing the Pyrocene: The Fort McMurray Project
Yekta Tarki

Yekta Tarki (she/her) explores the relationship between humans and nature amidst environmental crises through her drawings and paintings. Currently completing her MFA at the University of Calgary, she focuses on disasters caused by climate change, particularly the Fort McMurray wildfire in Alberta, Canada. Drawing on scientific data, her abstract works trace the wildfire’s timeline—from its onset to its aftermath—using shapes, lines, and colors to interpret fire’s intensity and lingering impact. In this painting she captures the moment of burning, using abstraction to evoke heat and urgency. Through this project, she seeks to raise awareness, foster dialogue, and inspire empathy.

(Left) Kat Pisani, Thread by Thread, 2025, Cement and Children’s Clothing, 240″ x 240″. Photo by Louie Villanueva-Eyre. (Right) Tooba Golshani Mehr, Echoes of Becoming (The Half Rabbit), 2025, Ceramics, Acrylic Matte Medium, Oil Paint, and Acrylics, 12.5″ x 6″ x 7.5″. Photo by Cerys Davies.

Thread by Thread
Kat Pisani

Performance: Tuesday, August 19, 12pm MT at Nickle Galleries

Thread by Thread explores how art can translate the weight of trauma into a shared affective experience. Through sculptural installation and performance, it uses repetition, domestic materials, and symbolic gesture to process intergenerational pain rooted in addiction. Grounded in lived experience, the work invites viewers into moments of mourning for a childhood lost. It serves as both therapeutic release and a space for silent witnessing. The work prompts reflection on addiction’s emotional toll while fostering empathy and destigmatization to those affected by it.

Echoes of Becoming
Tooba Golshani Mehr

Echoes of Becoming is a sculptural work by Tooba Golshani Mehr that explores the evolving nature of identity through tangible connections with the surroundings and the repetition of everyday events. The eighty ceramic rabbits reflect the present moment, inspired by daily encounters with the jackrabbits of Calgary. Sunflower paintings flowing across the rabbits’ bodies weave memories of the artist’s past in Tehran with the rhythms of her current life. Each rabbit and sunflower holds subtle, rooted differences that reveal gradual transformations over time, contemplating the inner and outer changes of self, community, and place.

(Left) Fatemeh Mohammadi Shamloo, Your Choice, 2025, Digital Photograph, 20″ x 30″. Photo Courtesy of the Artist. (Right) Yalda Jahan Panah, Beyond the Boundaries of Place, 2025, Photograph Printed on The Pro Ultra-Premium OHP Transparency Film, Mounted on Plexiglass in Pinewood Light Box (white-washed) with Built-in LED Lights, 16″ x 24″. Photo Courtesy of the Artist.

Your Choice
Fatemeh Mohammadi Shamloo

Fatemeh Mohammadi Shamloo’s photography explores memory, value, and the quiet traces people leave behind after death. Working on estate sales, she captures once-cherished objects in moments of transition—no longer in use, not yet forgotten. Using only natural light and never staging her scenes, her images evoke intimacy, absence, and the emotional weight of what remains. Informed by material culture theory and the concept of the extended self, Shamloo’s work reflects on how possessions carry identity, how we navigate loss through objects, and how meaning lingers—or fades—when lives come to an end.

Beyond the Boundaries of Place
Yalda Jahan Panah

Beyond the Boundaries of Place explores how layers of memory and belonging, extracted from different times and places, overlap and shift as one grows and moves through the world. This work is rooted in the artist’s experience of growing up in Iran, where being surrounded by people and places, gave meaning to daily life and shaped their sense of belonging. After moving to Canada, they began to see their new surroundings through the lens of past experiences, searching for details that connected them to earlier memories. This work creates a space for reflecting on the emotions that come with moving and starting over.

Reframing Women at Work in the Skilled Trades

August 20, 2025
Opening Reception: August 20, 2025, 5 – 7:30pm MT
Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, Aldred Event Space CA121, Calgary
Exhibition Information

Sydney Paquette, Climbing the Ladder, 2025, Acrylic and House Paint on Birch Panel, 48″ × 48″. Photo Courtesy of the Artist.

Reframing Women at Work in the Skilled Trades
Sydney Paquette

Sydney Paquette is a Calgary-based painter and MFA candidate at the University of Calgary. Her abstract paintings explore women’s experiences and agency in skilled trades, inspired by her background as a house painter and work with Youth Initiatives at SAIT. Using abstraction, she creates layered narratives that move beyond literal representation, highlighting the complexity of labour, identity, and embodiment. Her vibrant works combine bold shapes, bright colours, and abstracted trade tool forms with personal gestures like hair accessories and graffiti-like text, emphasizing resilience and emotional connection as women in the trades.

Nickle Galleries
410 University Crt NW
Calgary, AB T2N 14N
(403) 210-6201
9am – 4pm

Nickle Galleries is fully accessible, with automatic doors and an elevator to the upper-level exhibition space. The gallery welcomes all visitors and is committed to promoting inclusivity and accessibility.

Southern Alberta Institute of Technology
East Aldred Event Space CA121 – SAIT
Calgary 1301 16 Ave NW
Calgary, AB T2M 0L4
(403) 284-7248

The Aldred Centre is fully accessible. The event room is wheelchair-friendly on the main floor with multiple entrances and is conveniently close to the train station.