Turn a wheel to view a continuous loop of images. Manipulate a lever to move an image up or down. Ask a question; a spinning wheel reveals the answer.
These may sound like metaphors for finding romance in today’s app-heavy dating scene, but they’re actions you can take at local printmaker Brianna Tosswill’s first solo exhibit, Romantic Tensions, running at dhARTworld from May 23 to June 13, 2026. Each of the seven pieces in the show is a linocut print, which serves as an emotional core to the interactive wooden structure that encases it. Each piece is a scene from the emotional journey of the artist’s own dating life. (The final piece reveals illustrations of Tosswill with her partner.)
“I’m inspired by romance novels, rom-coms and movies that feel hopeful and are plotted like a romance — in which a happy ending is a foregone conclusion,” Tosswill says. Her work is inspired by architecture professor and installation artist Dennis Maher, especially his work A Second Home, which she experienced in Pittsburgh in 2017. Maher’s exhibit was an immersive 10-bedroom, three-story home he reimagined with parts of dollhouses, model trains and intricate puzzles. “I was just still in the middle of the room being like, ‘Holy shit, this is so cool,’” she recounts. “It’s art that you can only experience in real life.”
A graduate of OCAD University, Tosswill has been a printmaker for more than a decade, building a personal style whose soft colours and hand-carved images encompass both the somber and delightful aesthetics of your favourite romantic film. She has thoughtfully and purposefully placed each detail, colour and object in her linocuts, even as she describes linocut reduction as an “efficient” art form.
To bring her concepts for the wood sculptures to life, Tosswill enlisted her woodworker father, Charles Tosswill, to imagine working contraptions that allow the viewer to enter the work on a more personal level. Her dad also serves as an inspiration for Tosswill and her artistic career. “He never would think of himself as an artist,” she shares, “but his brain works like an artist’s. He always has a thing he wants to make.”
After graduating, one of the reasons Tosswill chose to move to Edmonton was the letterpress available at the Society of Northern Alberta Print-artists (SNAP), a publicly accessible printmaking studio — one of just over a dozen across Canada. She regularly works at the facility and instructs classes on linocut and other printmaking techniques there.
Tosswill is also one of the growing number of artists who is ditching Instagram and finding more intentional ways of engaging with fans of their work. She summarizes her experience with the platform: “The more time I spent on Instagram, the less hopeful I felt about the future.” Despite the many studies about social media’s negative effect on mental health, especially the health of kids and teens, she found it challenging to give up because the app was her conduit for news about world events.
She quit social media after listening to Amelia Hruby’s Off The Grid podcast, which provides 100 alternative ways for artists to share their work with an audience. Tosswill’s main way of connecting with fans is through her email newsletter. Since she gave up social media, she has realized it was working against her artistic practice. “My whole practice is about human connection. Instagram feels antithetical to human connection. It’s entertainment, but it’s not human connection.”
Romantic Tensions also entertains visitors, as well as connecting with them. Tosswill says she wants visitors to experience childlike wonder as they explore her intimate feelings about her dating experiences. The exhibit guides viewers to reflect on their emotions and to even create artistic expression of their own. For example, one of the pieces allows visitors to rearrange books on a shelf — each with their own word or phrase on the spine — like fridge magnet poetry.
She hopes visitors leave the experience feeling how they do when they exit a rom-com at the cinema: that it brings them joy and hope alongside their introspection. Tosswill says that joy and worry about the state of the world can co-exist. “What can you do in the meantime that’s not succumbing to hopelessness?”
This article appears in the May 2026 issue of Edify
