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with me for so long because I was like, ‘wow, this is why I’m here, for something as small as that.’ It took me so long to just turn it on its side.”
Chankasingh moved back to Edmonton after graduating from Emily Carr, but those lessons of simple subversion are still just as evident in her art. In her portraits, Chankasingh paints blurry-faced vignettes made from mashups of treasured family pictures. The result is simultaneously eerie and warm, fact and fiction, the paintings straddling a runny middle ground between concrete photographic record and fading collective memory. A mashup of identities herself — she has Trinidadian and Tobagonian roots, was born in
Yellowknife and split her childhood between the Northwest Territories and Edmonton — Chankasingh’s art navigates those feelings of place and placelessness.
“My style is getting to know myself. My style is leaving an impression and creating a memory that is not necessarily your own, but you can still relate to it. It’s like an absent memory,” Chankasingh says. “And that has a lot to do with my identi- ty as well because my being so far away from what my parents call ‘home’ is really different, because they still talk so highly about home and being home but they’re also proud to be Canadian.“
Beyond expressing herself as an artist, Chankasingh is also firmly grounded in the discipline of art. Whether that means making sure she always has a sketch- book on hand to record a runaway idea, learning the business of art or downsizing her paintings to accommodate custom- ers’ (very real) square footage concerns, Chankasingh applies the lessons she’s learned from art school, as well the school of life. The most important lesson of all, though, is one that both transcends and marks her work.
“It goes back to community and find- ing your community,” Chikasingh says, reflecting on the connections she’s made from Trinidad and Tobago, the Northwest Territories, Edmonton — and everywhere in between. “Once you’re with people who are able to support you, you have more freedom to do the things that you want to do and you don’t care if you make something bad. It takes the pressure off of making mistakes.”
— TOM NDEKEZI
36 EDify. OCTOBER.24
OKSANA MOVCHAN
I’m sitting in Oksana Movchan’s living room, where art made by her, her
late father, her sister and her partner, Gary James Joynes, adorn the walls. It’s a living gallery that tells the story of her life and the people she loves. Movchan herself is
a vision of vibrancy in a striking blazer, a reflection of the phase of life she’s currently embracing — one of brightness and renewal, much like her latest paintings.
Movchan’s life reads like a tapestry woven with threads of both brilliance and sorrow, each stitch carrying the weight
of memories, revealing a masterpiece of
resilience. Born and raised in Ukraine, in a family of artists, she was destined for a life imbued with creativity. “Kids play with toys, and we played with all my father’s art materials and painting brushes,” she says with a laugh.
Movchan attended a specialized art school from Grade 5, after which she was accepted into the Ukrainian National Academy of Arts, where she eventually graduated with a PhD in printmaking. She was then offered a position as an associate professor at the academy when she was just 27, an opportunity that came on the heels of her rapid success as an artist.