Lights On the Exchange 2026 Artworks

Wandering softly through a vast and nebulous space, shimmering blossoms emerge and unfold, multiplying as they slowly blend into total abstraction. Adrift in a world of luminescence and hazy chromaticity, Inflorescence II invites the viewer into a realm of impermanence, reflecting the ever-changing temperaments of both our inner and outer worlds.

Stephanie Kuse (she/her) is a media artist and graphic designer based in Saskatoon, SK.
Utilizing 3D-animation and digitally produced abstract textures, Stephanie creates lush visual worlds that blend organic form and movement with vibrant synthetic colours and crisp digital elements. Equal parts nostalgic and technical, Stephanie’s work has been viewed across North America and beyond in the form of projections for live performance, interactive installations, visualizers and music videos. In addition to frequent audio/visual collaborations, Stephanie
plays a role in bringing audiences together through sprawling projection installations as the
creative director and artist for HYPERART, an annual multidisciplinary festival in the heart of St. Boniface in Winnipeg, MB.

Combined with the accompanying poem, this piece reminds us that metaphors of love can be both dark and dulcet—viscerally tied to the body while also pursuing a romantic vision of a chosen future. Just as embroidery needs the sharpness of a needle to puncture fabric and wounds need thread to hold them shut against the world to heal, Sutures utilizes these medical and sewing references to draw parallels between medicine, craft, and the work of loving another person.

Zoë LeBrun (she/they) is an emerging multidisciplinary artist of settler descent practicing on Treaty 1 Territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Their practice rests at the intersections of video, installation, and sound art. Through these durational mediums, LeBrun seeks to better understand the human condition and explore themes such as temporality, the perceptual body, and existentialism. LeBrun’s work is rooted in the exploration of materials and processes that embody metaphors of lived experience and bodily function.

In 2025, she was one of three recipients of the Video Commission Residency through Video Pool Media Arts Centre, and recently attended the Studio H International Artists Residency with the generous support of the Manitoba Arts Council.

It has morphed into a search for the beauty and joy in the mirrored symmetrical patterns, angles and layers of a kaleidoscope, a testament to the power of artistic vision. 

“He stands in the garden
distracted by beauty.
Pulling his focus closer to his heart
Beauty, Beauty,
What a beast am I?”

Video maker, performance and installation artist Zachery Cameron Longboy, born in Churchill, Manitoba, of the Sayisi Dene lineage, brings a deeply felt, hybridity-layered perspective to his work. His videos often use his complex performance and installations as a departure point. Longboy is nationally honoured and widely shown in Private and public venues and public collections. Surrey Art Gallery, The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Glenbow Museum (Calgary), and The Canada Council Art Bank (Ottawa).

It is a research project that represents a specific set of data points, filtered through technologies, human decision-making, creative translation, and audience observations.  Peripherally, Regress Bloom is an exploration of algorithmic reinforcement, ‘filter bubbles’, and the human biases in digital systems development.

Through the interpretation of data, Regress Bloom explores confirmation bias and single-source scientific conclusions. Here, “bloom” can refer to the growth of cyanobacteria, but it can also point to our unfounded groupthink exacerbated by social media algorithms. And “regress” draws attention to the research conducted to prove what one already believes is a foregone conclusion.

Manufacturing Entertainment are artists Julie Gendron + Emma Hendrix. Collaborating for over 19 years, they use multiple mediums, including video, sound, installation, analog/digital technologies, the internet, and performance.

Using sound, installation and visual forms, Hendrix + Gendron take every day actions, objects and environments, and manipulate them in order to conjure multiple meanings in an unending exploration within themselves and, in turn, form new points of view for their audiences.

They work in textiles, paper, wire, lights, painting, and many other things.

Boyer’s art and research encompasses personal family narratives, entwined with Métis history, material culture, architectural spaces (human made and natural). Her work often explores boundaries between two opposing things as an effort to better understand both sides of a perceived dichotomous identity. This manifests in long, slow, and considerate laborious processes that attempt to unravel and better understand history, environmental influences, and personal memories.

Boyer has received a BFA from the University of Regina (Sculpture + Printmaking) and an MFA at the University of Manitoba. She currently holds a position as an Assistant Professor at the University of Manitoba, School of Art.

The video is a collaboration with Emilie Payeur.

Charlotte Clermont is a video artist living in Montreal, Quebec, interested in the moving image and the possible connection between the treatment of her materials and the themes which she explores. Working with VHS, MiniDV, Super8 and surveillance camera, the visual quality of her images, often dreamy and misty, tends to capture the complexity of her relationship towards people and her environment. Her videos are part of an oneiric universe and raises questions about her own emotional and psychological development. By reappropriating the image through analog manipulations and distortions, she subtly reveals a fragmented and non-linear narrative thread, where tension, intimacy, mystery and daily life coexist.

Her work has screened in Canada and internationally at galleries and festivals including Les Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois, Festival Oodaaq and the European Media Art Festival.

Emma Roufs is a Canadian (Quebecois) filmmaker with a particular interest in film-journal aesthetics and themes related to memory. Emma is a member and administrator of VISIONS, and co-founder of la lumière collective, two entities based in Montreal, Canada, dedicated to screening and shining a light onto experimental film practices and their makers. Her films have been shown in various festivals and cinema spaces around the world. Her first essay documentary ATALAYA (2021) was presented internationally and won awards at Cinema on the Bayou film festival (USA) and at Vues du Québec – Festival de cinéma de Florac (France).

Ryan Steel is an independent filmmaker and animator from Treaty 1 Territory (Winnipeg). His work plays in the intersections of experimental, documentary and narrative filmmaking.

Founded in 1974, the WFG is a charitable artist-run centre that is freshly coming off of the organization’s 50th anniversary, making this a particularly exciting moment to rediscover the depths of the archive and film collection. The WFG recently acquired an Archivist lasergraphics film scanner which has the capability to scan both 8mm and 16mm celluloid film gauges, resulting in a new burst of digitizations. This has made possible the screening of films that have been previously inaccessible until now.

Lights on the Catalogue invites us to take a moment to reflect upon how we honour the changes in our lives, and how we remember the moments and people that are always passing us by. It brings attention to the seasons and the passing of time. This is a film program that moves forward like the months in the calendar year, and asks us – what’s next? The last film, Daryl Nepinak’s incredible short “Last of the Nepinaks” (3 min, 2005), leaves us hopeful, looking towards tomorrow with kind and eager eyes. A south wind blows, spring is coming.