New Dimensions 2025 | uOttawa X Wall Space Gallery

Ishani Ghosh
Em Hernandez Velasco
Ruth Kelly-Koebel
Sophia Scanlon
Sabrina Ferrari
Evalyn Shields

August 14–30
Vernissage: Thursday, August 14 @ 5–7 pm

RSVP your attendance to responses@wallspacegallery.ca

New Dimensions 2025 Catalogue

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Wall Space Gallery is proud to present the New Dimensions exhibition 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 behaviour 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 embodied interaction and symbolic language, they lay bare the unspoken rules of belonging, and the impossibility of salvation in systems that refuse to count beyond the binary.

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

Ishani Ghosh

Ishani Ghosh is a visual artist based in Ottawa, Canada, working primarily in oil on canvas. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Ottawa, where she recently graduated with distinction. Drawing from her Indian heritage and diasporic perspective, Ghosh’s work explores the complexities of womanhood—particularly the experiences, and resilience of Indian women.

Her recent body of work confronts themes of oppression and resistance through a lens that is both intimate and culturally reflective. In 2024, she was awarded the Edmund and Isobel Ryan Scholarship for Painting, and her work was featured in “Bloom,” the graduating exhibition of the students of the BFA program at the University of Ottawa.

Em Hernandez Velasco

Em Hernandez Velasco is a Mexican-Canadian artist who creates installation-based artwork. She explores and celebrates culture and identity by combining various mediums and experiences, using photography, painting, and sculpture to create interactive works. Hernandez creates installation-based work because she believes we experience culture through interaction in the spaces we inhabit. By crafting these spaces and facilitating experiences, she offers audiences a place to reflect on and engage with culture.

Her art delves into her relationship with Mexican culture and how it has been shaped by her immigration to Canada. The work acts as a love letter to the elements that made Mexico feel like home — the things she brought with her to Canada, the things that tether her to Mexican culture. These are the items her family chose to bring when immigrating, and they are the aspects she wants to share with her audience.

Ruth Kelly-Koebel

Ruth Kelly-Koebel is a recent graduate of the University of Ottawa Bachelor of Fine Arts program. She is a multidisciplinary artist based in the City of Kawartha Lakes, Ontario, working across multimedia installation, painting, and textiles. Her practice explores a love for bright, bold colours, dynamic patterns, and engaging textures. She often works with recycled and found materials, incorporating sewing techniques to transform everyday objects into something unexpected. Through this transformation, she invites viewers to experience a sensory journey, where touch and texture are central to the work. She aims to create pieces that evoke a sense of joy, relaxation, and flow, allowing both herself and the viewer to enter a space of creative freedom. Her art is driven by a desire to think outside the box, to push boundaries, and to explore new ways of repurposing materials, ensuring that functional objects never return to their original form. Through abstraction and innovation, she strives to create unique, immersive experiences that challenge and delight.

Sophia Scanlon

Sophia Scanlon's work, which blends photos and textiles, is a medium through which she can express the delicateness of memory’s stability. Through her progressing relationship with her Nonna’s Alzheimer's, she has begun questioning the efficacy of images in capturing the essence of our memories. In many ways, this disease exposes the vulnerability of our brains and challenges our perception of reality; both for the person affected but also for those in their life. Her photographs become fragmented, altered, and pieced back together through collage and crochet, mirroring the disintegration and distortion of memory over time. In a world saturated with pictures, there is often a sense that these images hold some lasting permanency. However, her work questions the reliability of these truths. Are they dependable? Or do images, much like memories, shift over time and reveal new meanings and as we revisit them?

Sabrina Ferrari and Evalyn Shields

Evalyn Shields and Sabrina Ferrari are an anti-disciplinary queer artist duo who live and study on the traditional unceded land of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation. Raised in so-called Ottawa, Shields is a Croatian/Irish Lesbian artist, and Ferrari is a queer Italian/Francophone artist from the Tkaronto|Toronto area. The duo has recently graduated from their BFA and will begin their MFA in the fall of 2025 at the University of Ottawa.

Their anti-disciplinary collaborative practice responds to the contradictions of living in a supposedly secular, progressive, liberal democracy steeped in repressive traditional Judeo-Christian cultural values. Utilizing large scale installation, their work offers interactive, at times, melancholic reflections on queer subjectivity and the malalignment of queerness within dominant cultural narratives. Their work offers embodied knowledge to reflect upon themes of social conditioning, cultural inheritance, language, and the encoding of the symbolic order which forms the backdrop of our lives. Borrowing from the aesthetic strategies of religious practice, they create spaces of hushed reverence and contemplation in an attempt to reveal the rigidity and impossibility of the promise of salvation from a system that insists on only counting to two.