Nellie Lamb is a MA candidate in the University of Victoria’s Art History and Visual Studies department. Her current research focuses on a 1964 NFB film, In Search of Innocence, written and directed by Léonard Forest, which examines the lives and art of several of Vancouver’s artists, poets, and musicians. Her formative years spent in Vancouver where she was raised by and among artists have influenced her research interests, which include modern and contemporary art of Canada’s west coast, artist communities, and ideas of utopia and urbanism. As an emerging curator, Nellie aims to collaborate with artists in an effort to realize innovative and original exhibitions and installations of their work. She is interested in working with artists and artworks that meditate on, investigate, and affect space and our relationships with specific spaces particularly by focusing on memory, minutia, and temporality.

Elizabeth Charters completed her BFA in Visual Art in 2016 at the University of Victoria, located on WSÁNEĆ territory. In an ever-expanding world of constant accessibility and fleeting information, Charters is interested in deliberate communication and moments of connection. As we are constantly situated as viewers in constructed environments, a large part of her practice has evolved from a response to this daily onslaught of images and texts we receive in urban centers. In a grand sense, Charters uses sculpture to ask why it is that we live the way we do and to point out what is both beautiful and sad about it. Charters most often chooses to work with light and language to invent or construct a moment of pause when a viewer encounters her work. With language and text works, she investigates the authority of voice, the notion of authorship, and the power of communication as it manifests in the realm of objecthood. Previous studies in English literature and creative writing have led Charters to fictionalize, borrow, and personalize text to transform simple phrases, idioms, and intimate sentiments into work that stimulates the viewer through the transformative condition of language in changing contexts.