Who is Your Self-ie
Online Juried Group Exhibition
May 17 to June 30, 2026
Juror: Ella Morton and Andy Fabo
Curator: Lisa Murzin
As part of the CONTACT Photography Festival 2026, the John B. Aird Gallery presents Who is Your Self-ie?, an online group exhibition. Juried by Ella Morton, lens-based artist and filmmaker, and Andy Fabo, artist, art critic, curator, and educator, this exhibition features contemporary artists working in Canada and explores the selfie and self-portrait as sites of identity, reflection, experimentation, and transformation.
Curated by Lisa Murzin, Who is Your Self-ie? brings together a wide range of photo-based practices, including digital photography, analogue processes, mixed media, collage, abstraction, and portraiture. The works turn the lens inward to consider intimacy, loss, rage, whimsy, self-affirmation, transcendence, and the many ways artists construct, dismantle, and reimagine the self.
We are thrilled to showcase featuring artists, Anda Marcu, Joe Atikian, Bonnie Baker, Lucy Barnett, Mike Callaghan, Melanie Chikofsky, Samuel Choisy, Judy Daley, Andrew Donnelly, Corinne Duchesne, Lin Duperron, Elinor Galbraith, Gunilla Josephson, Elsa Hashemi, Jennifer Henriksen, Diane Holmes, Paula Huisman, Callan Jaida Jones, Jelica Jovin, Rhodri Kasperbauer, Therese Kirchner, Victoria Laube, Gail Leija, Eva Lewarne, Julius Poncelet Manapul, Mariam Magsi, Caroline Mosby, Ralph Nevins, Frances Patella, Pam Patterson, Atia Pokorny, Robert Quance, Dale M Reid, Melanie Robitaille, Lois Schklar, Walter Segers, Sepanta Saeb, Kristin Sweetland, Natalia Tcherniak, Robert Teteruck, Michael Toke, Jeff van Leeuwen, Viz Saraby, Christian Wenger, Yu-Sheng Chiu, and Shalan and Paul.
AWARD WINNERS
For our first gathering of the year, AIRD Gallery hosted a reception on May 15, celebrating photography and recognizing this year’s award winners. This gathering marks the first of many in-person AIRD Gallery events to come, and we are excited to celebrate and showcase the work of this year’s selected artists.
Congratulations to this year’s award-winning artists: Jeff van Leeuwen, Yu-Sheng Chiu, Elsa Hashemi and Atia Pokorny, whose works were recognized for their depth, originality, and emotional resonance.
Jeff Van Leeuwen
Plasticinicity
From first glance, Jeff van Leeuwen’s photograph, Plasticinicity, caught my eye.
The image, a stark fist dangling a mesh bag containing a cast mask of the artist’s visage resonated with me, sensing mortality, loss, and grief. I was reminded of the death mask of Egon Schiele (the Austrian Expressionist who died from
Spanish Flu of 1918) as well as Marcel Duchamp’s 1959 mixed-media work, With My Tongue in My Cheek, incorporating a plaster cast of his cheek into the drawn self-portrait in profile.
Jeff van Leeuwen’s photograph paradoxically embodies both the wry irony of the Duchamp selfie and the frisson of the Schiele death mask. Later, when I researched van Leeuwen and his art practice, I discovered my intuition was not far off the mark. Much of his art has dealt with mourning and he is pointedly an intermedia artist often working in assemblage, a medium developed by Duchamp and his Dada peers. However, van Leeuwen’s photography and sculpture doesn’t get overly tangled in the tendrils of art history; there is a fresh vitality to his work that reflects his strategy of thoughtful synthesis.
Selected by Andy Fabo
Yu-Sheng Chiu
Ghost of Her Sorrow
Ghost of her Sorrow offers an authentic expression of identity that holds both ambiguity and richly textured specificity. This work reaches into other realms while also speaking to the socio-political complexities of existing in the world in the present day. It invites the viewer into an emotional landscape that is layered and impactful, leaving room for each of us to pull out the threads that affect us the most.
Selected by Ella Morton
Atia Pokorny
Invisible Woman
Atia Pokorny’s Invisible Woman is so perfectly invisible that she becomes universally recognizable, both formally and thematically. Existing somewhere between abstraction and realism, between photograph, painting and collage, between light-ful colour and emphatic black, the picture challenges us to look past the edges of our perception.
Selected by Arnie Guha
Elsa Hashemi
Everyday Practice Collection
Selected by Downtown Camera
We would like to extend our sincere thanks to Downtown Camera for their generous support of our event. Your contribution helped make this gathering possible and allowed us to celebrate photography, creativity, and community in a meaningful way. We are grateful for your continued commitment to supporting artists and local arts initiatives.
