New Dimensions 2025 | uOttawa x Wall Space Gallery

Exhibition Dates: August 14 – 30
Vernissage: Thursday, August 14 from 5 – 7 pm

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 2025 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.

• Em Hernandez Velasco 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.
• Ishani 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 honour resilience while unsettling dominant histories.
• Ruth 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.
• Sophia 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.
• Evalyn Shields and Sabrina 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.

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 2025 invites viewers into a shared dialogue about what it means to remember, to belong, and to be.

We look forward to welcoming you to the gallery for the vernissage on Thursday, August 14, from 5 – 7 pm.

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