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Main Floor

Reception: Thursday September 25, 7-9 p.m. | View the PDF e-vite

About the show:

This vibrant collection of 100 individual plein air paintings captures the raw and breathtaking beauty of Alberta’s natural landscapes, rendered through the dynamic brushwork and intuitive vision of Samantha Williams-Chapelsky. Known for her expressive technique and emotional expressionism of the environment, Williams-Chapelsky brings to life the diverse geography of the province—from expansive prairie skies and shimmering lakes to rugged mountain ranges and boreal forests.

Created entirely on location, each painting reflects a moment in time, shaped by shifting weather, changing light, and the artist’s personal response to her surroundings. With every canvas, Williams-Chapelsky invites viewers to slow down and witness the subtle transitions of season and atmosphere that define Alberta’s unique ecology.

This exhibition marks a homecoming for the artist, as it is held at her alma mater, the ¶®É«µÛ. It offers not only a visual chronicle of place but also a heartfelt reconnection to where her artistic journey began. Through this body of work, Williams-Chapelsky honors the land that has inspired her for decades and reaffirms her lifelong commitment to painting directly from life.

Together, these 100 plein air pieces form a meditative and immersive tribute to Alberta’s natural world—both vast and intimate, fleeting and eternal.

About the artist:

Samantha Williams-Chapelsky is an accomplished visual artist who earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the ¶®É«µÛ in 2009, graduating with distinction. Specializing in painting and art history, she is widely recognized for her abstracted landscape paintings that explore the interplay of textured acrylics and oils. Samantha’s work is exhibited in both public and commercial galleries throughout Canada and the United States, earning acclaim for her unique artistic approach.

In addition to her studio practice, Samantha is a dedicated educator and mentor. She leads workshops in plein air painting, studio techniques, and business practices for artists, helping students hone their creative and professional skills. Samantha also hosts an annual European retreat focused on acrylic techniques and plein air painting, offering artists an immersive experience in the scenic outdoors. Through various studio workshops across Canada, she fosters a tactile, expressionistic approach to painting, while also providing valuable guidance on social media, crafting artist statements, and navigating the modern art world for emerging and contemporary artists.

This show is sponsored in part by: 

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Artist Presentation: Samantha Williams-Chapelsky

Friday Sept. 19 | 11 a.m. | FAB Gallery (FAB 1-01)

U of A students, staff & faculty are invited to join Alberta Artist in Residence, Samantha Williams-Chapelsky for a fun and informative artist talk and demonstration. Samantha has spent the past year travelling the province and creating 100 plein air paintings of Alberta's landscapes. A U of A BFA Alumni, Samantha has developed a successful career as an artist and is excited to share information and her plein air process with Art & Design students. All are welcome.

Please join us in FAB gallery at 11 a.m. and come prepared to venture outside for a plein air painting demonstration.

Second Floor

September 2-27, 2025

Reception: Thursday September 25, 7-9 p.m. | View the PDF e-vite

About the show:

Robert Shannon has invested time sketching en plein air or in situ in Paris. As an educator trained in theatre design, Shannon’s drawing practice might at first seem like a nonessential activity; but spending time looking closely—whether in Paris museums or on its bustling city streets—helps him visually communicate complex ideas in three dimensions. The Paris Sketchbooks showcases drawings from April 26 to May 20, 2017 alongside plaster busts and archival slides of paintings and sculptures from the Louvre, visually linking Shannon’s drawing and design practices. By keeping his eye in tune with his hand, he flexes an important ‘muscle’, so to speak, one that connects what we see to what we do.

The sketches are hung so that visitors can trace Shannon’s progress, from days when drawing comes easy to those where he produces only a few sketches, or none at all. Including the gaps where his production slows or comes to a complete halt creates a kind of rhythmic, visual language that illustrates the importance of exploratory gestures and slow, embodied looking. In a world that sometimes feels like it moves at a break-neck pace, taking time to see objects or places from multiple angles can feel like a luxury. However, paying close attention to the world around us is essential to any creative endeavour, as it fosters curiosity and helps us move beyond what we habitually notice or believe to be possible.

When he is in Paris, Shannon does not feel out of place sketching in museums or the street; in fact, the way Paris is designed encourages artists to become deeply entangled with their urban environments. The Paris Sketchbooks therefore invites visitors to participate in this kind of sustained looking, and to contribute their own sketches to the gallery space using the drawing materials provided. What might you notice about the objects on display, FAB Gallery’s architecture, the world beyond its walls, or yourself in the process?

Main Floor

Reception: Thursday October 16, 7-9 p.m. | View the PDF e-vite

About the show:

Eunna’s artistic practice centers on forest landscapes that bridge imagination and reality, embodying the sublimity of life’s eternal cycle—birth, decay, and renewal. From the perspective of a mother of two children, Eunna perceives the forest as a nurturing space—like a mother’s womb—that embraces and sustains life. To her the forest is the root of all life, a source that revives our natural vitality, sensitivity, and intelligence.

As a Canadian artist who immigrated from Korea, she is deeply influenced by the Korean belief that all living beings—as well as inanimate objects within the forest— possess souls. This perspective closely aligns with the Cree worldview, which emphasizes the interconnectedness of all life, including humans, within nature. Rooted in these philosophies, the forest landscapes Eunna creates move beyond a human-centered thinking that separates humans from nature. Instead, she envisions a space where humans are part of the natural world, deeply connected to all living beings.

Incorporating a wide range of media, Eunna creates forest landscape artworks as multi-dimensional and multi-sensory experiences. Photographs of forest regions from around Alberta serve as the foundation for each piece, onto which she layers painting, printmaking, embroidery and tufting. The subtlety of these additions reconstruct the forest landscape, reflecting the complexity of forest ecosystems and giving the impression that the work is alive and growing, as vibrant as the forests that they represent. By combining forest sounds with her visual practice, she invites viewers to experience the vitality of the forest through multiple senses, hoping their imagination will reawaken the forest landscape as a meditative and transcendent space.

In her work, the forest is a living entity—one that breathes, connects, and holds the memories of countless generations. Through these forest landscapes, she invites reflection on our shared responsibility to protect and coexist with these sacred ecosystems

About the artist:

 Eunna Oh works at the intersection of painting, photography, fiber art, and installation. Her work bridges the realms of imagination and reality, and her artistic journey is deeply rooted in a profound reverence for both humanity and the natural world. She creates forest landscape artworks as a way to understand and communicate the essential balance between humanity and nature, along with the value of sustainable coexistence in an age of ecological crisis.

Eunna was born in Tongyoung, South Korea, and immigrated to Canada in 2011. She is currently based in Treaty Six Territory (Edmonton, Alberta). She studied Fine Art at Sangmyung University and then received her MFA in Fiber Art at the Hongik University in Seoul, South Korea, where she completed a practice-based research project entitled “A Study on the Representation of the Forest as an Imaginary World.” She is currently completing her MFA in Painting at the ¶®É«µÛ. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions throughout Asia and Canada, including Hongik Contemporary Art Museum (Seoul, South Korea), TV Asahi UMU Art Space (Tokyo, Japan), Kuching International Delphic Council Center (Sarawax, Malaysia), the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada (Winnipeg), and Alberta Society of Artists Gallery(Calgary). Her upcoming solo exhibition, Forest Landscape for Coexistence, will be held at the Art Gallery of St. Albert in February 2026.

Reception: Thursday October 16, 7-9 p.m. | View the PDF e-vite

About the show:

 . . .  a group exhibition and collective response to Laura Elkin’s 2024 book Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art.

What kind of art does a monster make? And what if monster is a verb? To monster is to defy, to transgress, to overwhelm. To invent new languages for beauty, for embodiment, for truth.

Inspired by Laura Elkin’s 2024 book Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, this exhibition
emerges from the collective reflections of the members of the Master of Fine Art’s reading group to Elkin’s work. It is both a response and an extension—a confrontation with how we, as artists and as embodied beings, make sense of ourselves in politically, socially, economically, ecologically, and technologically turbulent times.

Our conversations about Elkin’s book were frank, vulnerable, and often raw. We asked: How do we tell the truth of our experiences—of our emotional, aging bodies—when the world has long told us not to and really prefers not to see them? We asked what it would mean (if we dare from within the academy) to make monstrous art—not art that conforms or soothes, but art that unsettles, leaks, resists, shocks. We also reflected that to be a feminist artist today, is very different to being a feminist artist in the 1970s, which is the period that Elkin mostly focuses on. Many of us felt driven to reevaluate our relationships with our mothers and grandmothers, to challenge decisions they had made as they made us, and to admit we took their struggles for granted. In this spirit, Monstrous & Tender is both an exhibition and a promise—to go further, to go fleshier, to dare to present the truth of our unruly bodies, relations and realities. The works in this exhibition are not isolated responses, but part of an ongoing dialogue—among ourselves, with each other, with our mothers and sisters, and with the feminist artists and writers Elkin traces in Art Monsters.

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2025-2026 Exhibitions

September 2-27, 2025

• Main Floor: Sky, Stone, and Prairie: Plein Air Perspectives of Alberta | Samantha Williams-Chapelsky
• Second Floor: The Paris Sketchbooks | Robert Shannon

October 3, 2025

• Homegrown | VASA Annual Art Auction

October 14 - November 8, 2025

• Main Floor: The Forest - Where We Belong | Eunna Oh, MFA in Painting
• Second Floor: Monstrous & Tender | a curated group exhibition by Marilène Oliver

November 25-December 18, 2025

• Main Floor: Olivia Arau McSweeny, MFA Thesis Printmaking
• Second Floor: Precarious Work and Mental Health: Exploring Uncertainty through Research-Creation | Lisa Wood, Dr. Breanna Lawrence and Dr. Rebecca Hudson Breen, and Dr. Rachel Herron. With Artist-research assistants—Renata Truelove, Michael Vachon, and Dhairya Vaidya

January 13 - February 7, 2026

• Main Floor: Help! I Need Somebody. Help! Not Just Anybody | An exhibition of artwork and creative research by Technical Demonstrators in Art & Design.
• Second Floor: Alcuin Society Awards for Book Design in Canada

February 24 - March 21, 2026

• Main Floor: X-Painting | Jesse Thomas
• Second Floor: Sheryl Spencer, MFA Thesis Printmaking

March 31 - April 11, 2026

• 2026 Bachelor of Design Graduation Exhibition

April 21 - May 2, 2026

• 2026 Bachelor of Fine Art Graduation Exhibition

May 26 - June 20, 2026

• Aynaz Raoufian, MFA Thesis Intermedia
• Mona Sahi, MFA Thesis Intermedia