New Dimensions 2025 | uOttawa X Wall Space Gallery
August 14–30
Ishani Ghosh
Em Hernandez Velasco
Ruth Kelly-Koebel
Sophia Scanlon
Sabrina Ferrari
Evalyn Shields
Reception: Thursday, August 14 @ 5 – 7 pm
RSVP your attendance to responses@wallspacegallery.ca
Wall Space Gallery is proud to present New Dimensions 2025 in collaboration with the University of Ottawa's BFA program, featuring works by Ishani Ghosh, Em Hernandez Velasco, Ruth Kelly-Koebel, Sophia Scanlon, and the duo Sabrina Ferrari and Evalyn Shields.
In a world shaped by migration, patriarchy, colonial legacies, and rapid cultural shifts, the question of identity, how it is formed, remembered, inherited, and resisted, remains a central, urgent concern. New Dimensions brings together six artists whose practices explore the layered complexity of selfhood through material, memory, and space. Through installation, craft, photography, and painting, these artists question how personal and collective identities are shaped by larger systems and how the visual and tactile can offer new ways of understanding one’s place within or outside of them.
Hernandez explores the diasporic experience through installation-based work that serves as a physical and emotional bridge between Mexico and Canada. Her practice is rooted in the preservation of cultural memory, what was chosen, carried, and remembered through migration. Her immersive spaces evoke a sense of belonging and interaction, offering audiences a deeply personal reflection on cultural continuity and transformation. Hernandez’s work becomes a container for memory, a love letter to the familiar objects and spaces that tether one to home.
Ghosh engages in a powerful visual reclamation of Indian womanhood. Her paintings blend the elegance of Western classical aesthetics with the rich subjectivity of Indian women, challenging patriarchal and colonial gazes that have long shaped cultural narratives. Her work becomes both a tribute and a confrontation, a way to honor resilience while unsettling dominant histories. Ghosh crafts a space where the traditionally silenced or flattened figure of the woman is rendered with nuance, pride, and agency.
Kelly-Koebel turns the domestic interior into a site of inquiry and contradiction. Her intricately beaded, stitched, and painted surfaces recall the comforting order of home, yet subtle disruptions within her compositions hint at underlying fragility. Through abstraction, repetition, and material layering, she questions the invisible frameworks, emotional, structural, and aesthetic, that shape behavior and identity. Her work suggests that the very spaces we construct for safety may also become sites of quiet tension and unraveling.
Scanlon addresses memory not as static preservation but as a shifting, fragile phenomenon. Drawing from her evolving relationship with her grandmother’s Alzheimer's, she blends photography with textile collage and crochet to mimic the fragmentation and distortion of memory. Her tactile, altered imagery challenges the presumed permanence of photographs, posing the question: Can an image ever truly hold a moment? Scanlon’s work is both deeply personal and broadly resonant, a meditation on time, loss, and the unreliability of what we remember.
Shields and Ferrari, in their collaborative practice, build contemplative spaces that echo the aesthetics of religious ritual while dismantling the ideological systems they represent. Their installations confront the contradictions of growing up queer in a supposedly progressive yet deeply conservative cultural landscape. Infused with melancholy and reverence, their work reclaims ritual as a tool for queerness, grief, and resistance. Through movement and meaningful symbols, they reveal the hidden rules about who is allowed to belong and how true acceptance is impossible in systems that only recognize narrow definitions of identity.
Together, these artists form a tapestry of voices grappling with the tensions between stability and instability, memory and distortion, tradition and disruption. Their works remind us that identity is not static. It is constructed, inherited, revised, and often contested. Through deeply personal yet universally resonant approaches, they offer not answers but spaces to question, to feel, and to reflect. In doing so, New Dimensions invites viewers into a shared dialogue about what it means to remember, to belong, and to be.
Curator
Haruka Toyoda
Featured work:
Ishani Ghosh, Veil of the Wind, Oil on canvas
Sabrina Ferrari & Evalyn Shields, he loves me, Analog photograph nailed onto wooden altar
August 14–30
Ishani Ghosh
Em Hernandez Velasco
Ruth Kelly-Koebel
Sophia Scanlon
Sabrina Ferrari
Evalyn Shields
Reception: Thursday, August 14 @ 5 – 7 pm
RSVP your attendance to responses@wallspacegallery.ca
Wall Space Gallery is proud to present New Dimensions 2025 in collaboration with the University of Ottawa's BFA program, featuring works by Ishani Ghosh, Em Hernandez Velasco, Ruth Kelly-Koebel, Sophia Scanlon, and the duo Sabrina Ferrari and Evalyn Shields.
In a world shaped by migration, patriarchy, colonial legacies, and rapid cultural shifts, the question of identity, how it is formed, remembered, inherited, and resisted, remains a central, urgent concern. New Dimensions brings together six artists whose practices explore the layered complexity of selfhood through material, memory, and space. Through installation, craft, photography, and painting, these artists question how personal and collective identities are shaped by larger systems and how the visual and tactile can offer new ways of understanding one’s place within or outside of them.
Hernandez explores the diasporic experience through installation-based work that serves as a physical and emotional bridge between Mexico and Canada. Her practice is rooted in the preservation of cultural memory, what was chosen, carried, and remembered through migration. Her immersive spaces evoke a sense of belonging and interaction, offering audiences a deeply personal reflection on cultural continuity and transformation. Hernandez’s work becomes a container for memory, a love letter to the familiar objects and spaces that tether one to home.
Ghosh engages in a powerful visual reclamation of Indian womanhood. Her paintings blend the elegance of Western classical aesthetics with the rich subjectivity of Indian women, challenging patriarchal and colonial gazes that have long shaped cultural narratives. Her work becomes both a tribute and a confrontation, a way to honor resilience while unsettling dominant histories. Ghosh crafts a space where the traditionally silenced or flattened figure of the woman is rendered with nuance, pride, and agency.
Kelly-Koebel turns the domestic interior into a site of inquiry and contradiction. Her intricately beaded, stitched, and painted surfaces recall the comforting order of home, yet subtle disruptions within her compositions hint at underlying fragility. Through abstraction, repetition, and material layering, she questions the invisible frameworks, emotional, structural, and aesthetic, that shape behavior and identity. Her work suggests that the very spaces we construct for safety may also become sites of quiet tension and unraveling.
Scanlon addresses memory not as static preservation but as a shifting, fragile phenomenon. Drawing from her evolving relationship with her grandmother’s Alzheimer's, she blends photography with textile collage and crochet to mimic the fragmentation and distortion of memory. Her tactile, altered imagery challenges the presumed permanence of photographs, posing the question: Can an image ever truly hold a moment? Scanlon’s work is both deeply personal and broadly resonant, a meditation on time, loss, and the unreliability of what we remember.
Shields and Ferrari, in their collaborative practice, build contemplative spaces that echo the aesthetics of religious ritual while dismantling the ideological systems they represent. Their installations confront the contradictions of growing up queer in a supposedly progressive yet deeply conservative cultural landscape. Infused with melancholy and reverence, their work reclaims ritual as a tool for queerness, grief, and resistance. Through movement and meaningful symbols, they reveal the hidden rules about who is allowed to belong and how true acceptance is impossible in systems that only recognize narrow definitions of identity.
Together, these artists form a tapestry of voices grappling with the tensions between stability and instability, memory and distortion, tradition and disruption. Their works remind us that identity is not static. It is constructed, inherited, revised, and often contested. Through deeply personal yet universally resonant approaches, they offer not answers but spaces to question, to feel, and to reflect. In doing so, New Dimensions invites viewers into a shared dialogue about what it means to remember, to belong, and to be.
Curator
Haruka Toyoda
Featured work:
Ishani Ghosh, Veil of the Wind, Oil on canvas
Sabrina Ferrari & Evalyn Shields, he loves me, Analog photograph nailed onto wooden altar