2026 MFA Exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Guelph

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

This May, the Art Gallery of Guelph is pleased to present the graduating exhibitions of 2026 MFA candidates Celeste Cares and Clea Christakos-Gee. Using processes of material and digital translation, their painting and collage practices explore how images accrue meaning through repetition, circulation, and fragmentation.

Marking the culmination of two years of focused work in the MFA program, the Art Gallery of Guelph’s annual presentation of graduating exhibitions is organized in partnership with the School of Fine Art and Music and the College of Arts at the University of Guelph.

Celeste Cares: Eyes Without a Face

May 7 – 12, 2026

In Georges Franju’s 1960 French horror film Les yeux sans visage, a surgeon’s daughter is left disfigured in a car crash. Desperate to restore her beauty, her father begins a murderous quest to harvest facial features for a series of unsuccessful transplants. Throughout the film, the daughter wears a mask revealing only her eyes, obscuring any expression that might betray her lived reality. She becomes “eyes without a face,” perceptive yet unable to express emotion, while her father becomes a face without eyes, driven by emotion yet unable to perceive the horrors of his actions. In 1984, Billy Idol borrowed the film’s English title for his hit single, using it to evoke a sense of emotional and moral disintegration that he associated with the 1980s.

Both the film and song resonate with the dissociation and anxiety that permeate Celeste Cares’ oil paintings, as well as her sustained focus on surface, appearances, and gendered dynamics. Cares reworks found images drawn from media and consumer culture—including television characters, mannequins, kitsch collectibles, and luxury goods—into uncanny psychological portraits. Like Idol, she borrows from the recent past to reanimate familiar cultural forms and conventions. Through painting, these images are unsettled and reconfigured, producing a space in which surfaces both conceal and reveal.

Image details: Celeste Cares, Mannequin ii (detail), 2025, oil on wood panel, 27.9 x 35.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Clea Christakos-Gee: Clear Sleeve

May 16 – 21, 2026

Working with found imagery, Clea Christakos-Gee cuts, collects, and composes collage pieces, embracing the material qualities of photography to create intimate and diaristic works. Her practice of organizing images emerged after her first hospitalization for psychosis. Working with photographs has been not only a way of engaging with the residue of that experience, but also of expressing fractured thought, image, perception, and ego. Collage allows her to work inside disorientation, to shape from it rather than resolve it, tracing relationships between psychological and visual fragments.

Christakos-Gee’s Album works are enlarged images documenting overlapping photo album sleeves filled with cut-outs. Thinking through context and containment, transparent materials become sites where images float and overlap. Tightly compressed, photographs from the artist’s collection start to speak to one another. Drawn to source material charged with multiple meanings and possibilities, she considers how they can be activated when placed in proximity. Filtered through both physical and digital conditions, the work uses the visual logic of fragmentation to consider how experiences of rupture can manifest materially.

Image details: Clea Christakos-Gee, Album 01 (detail), 2025, Inkjet print on transparent film, 76.2 x 114.3 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

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.

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