Cartographies of Longing

About the Artists

Muriel Ahmarani Jaouich is a Canadian artist of Armenian, Egyptian, and Lebanese descent whose painting practice explores genealogy, intergenerational trauma, and historical violence. Deeply rooted in her family’s histories of diaspora, immigration, and genocide, her work draws from oral histories, photographic archives, and inherited objects. She transforms these sources into narratives that weave memory and imagination, resonating with the complexities of ancestral grief. Her practice is grounded in a continual process of listening, with the belief that attending to ancestral grief can create pathways toward liberation for present and future generations.

Ahmarani Jaouich lives in Tiohtià:ke / Montreal, Quebec, on the traditional territory of the Kanien’kehá Nation. She is a recipient of the Lilian Vineberg Scholarship, Merit Scholarship, and Tom Hopkins Memorial Award. Her work has been exhibited at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Patel Brown, CLARK Center, articule, Printemps du MAC, and Arsenal New York. Her paintings are held in institutional and corporate collections, including the Doris McCarthy Gallery, Hydro-Québec, RBC, and Scotiabank, as well as in private collections in the United States, Italy, Czechia, Spain, and Canada. Ahmarani Jaouich is represented by Patel Brown.

Nour Bishouty is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, moving image, works on paper, writing, and artist publishing. Her work attends to fragmentation in history, and the ways knowledge and fantasy are produced and withheld. Bishouty’s work has been exhibited internationally including at Museo Universitario del Chopo (2026), Mexico City; Liverpool Biennial (2025); Cooper Cole, Toronto (2025); Art Jameel, Jeddah (2024), La biennale de Québec (2024);  Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto (2022); GTA21 Triennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto (2021); Darat Al Funun, Amman (2017); Casa Arabe, Madrid (2016); Access Gallery, Vancouver (2015); the Mosaic Rooms, London (2015); and the Beirut Art Centre, Beirut (2014). 

Amanda Boulos (she/her) is a visual artist and educator based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Boulos explores how oral narratives from Palestine, Lebanon, and Canada shape the Palestinian diaspora or shattat. She recently exhibited at Centre Clark (Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, QC), Clint Roenisch Gallery (Tkaronto/Toronto, ON), The Bows (Mohkínstsis/Calgary, AB), No.9 Gardens/Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Ka’tarohkwi/Kingston, ON), and de Montigny, (Ottawa, ON). She was the winner of the 20th RBC Painting Prize, and has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. Boulos is an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at OCAD University, a founding member of the Toronto project space the plumb, and a programmer for the Toronto Palestine Film Festival. 

Deanna Bowen is a descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky-born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been the central focus of her interdisciplinary autoethnographic works since the early 1990s. Her artistic works were recently showcased at the Leonard and Ellen Bina Gallery, National Gallery of Canada, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Gibson Art Museum, and the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Deanna has also received numerous awards supporting her practice, including the 2021 Scotiabank Photography Award, the 2020 Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts, a 2018 Canada Council Research and Creation Grant, an Ontario Arts Council Media Arts Grant in 2017, a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize. Bowen lives in Montréal, where she is also an Associate Professor, Studio Arts at Concordia University. 

Meryl McMaster earned her BFA in Photography from the Ontario College of Art and Design University (2010) and is currently based in Québec, Canada. Known for her large-format self-portraits that have a distinct performative quality, she explores questions of self through land, lineage, history, and culture, with specific reference to her mixed nêhiyaw (Plains Cree), Métis, British and Dutch ancestry. Meryl is a citizen of Siksika Nation in Alberta and her family it also from Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan.

McMaster’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the McMaster Museum of Art, the Heard Museum, Remai Modern, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Montclair Museum, Musée d’art de Joliette, Joliette, Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art Gallery, Merignac Photo, McCord Museum, Canada House London, Ikon Gallery, Ryerson Image Centre, Glenbow Museum, Momenta Biennale Montreal, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, and Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian New York, amongst others.

Her work has also appeared in group exhibitions at the Humboldt Forum Berlin, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Cummer Museum, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Autry Museum, Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Sprengel Museum, Heard Museum, Anchorage Museum, Australian Centre for Photography, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, National Gallery of Canada, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Denver Art Museum, Pérez Art Museum and Art Gallery of Alberta, to name a few.

She is the recipient of numerous awards including the King Charles III’s Coronation Medal, Scotiabank New Generation Photography Award, REVEAL Indigenous Art Award, Charles Pachter Prize for Emerging Artists, Canon Canada Prize, Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship and OCAD U Medal. She was shortlisted for the Rencontres d’Arles New Discovery Award 2019, Prix de la Photo Madame Figaro Arles 2019, and longlisted for the 2016 Sobey Art Award.

McMaster is represented by Stephen Bulger Gallery (Toronto, Canada) and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain (Montréal, Canada)

Arthur Shilling, artist (b at Rama IR, Orillia, Ont 19 Apr 1941; d there 4 Mar 1986). The son of Ojubwa parents, Shilling attended the Mohawk Institute Residential School (Brantford, Ont) and the Ontario College of Art. He won national acclaim at his first solo show in Ottawa in 1967. Using oil on canvas, he depicted life on the Rama Reserve, where he built an art gallery to encourage local talent. His specialty was portraits in a broad impressionist style.

In May 1983 Shilling was one of 7 Canadian artists invited by Governor General Edward Schreyer to show at Rideau Hall Ottawa. His paintings are in many corporate and private collections throughout North America. His life is documented in the film The Beauty of My People (NFB, 1978). Shilling's book The Ojibway Dream (1986) was published posthumously by Tundra Press, Montréal.

Travis Shilling (b.1978) is the youngest of two sons to the acclaimed Indigenous artist Arthur Shilling (1941-1986). Travis began his own professional career as a teenager, leading to success as a painter, film director, and playwright. His expressive brushstrokes and unique colour palette transport the viewer to a cinematic landscape that explores the impact of climate change on the environment with thoughtful, clever insight. Shilling reflects on the responsibilities of being an Indigenous artist by commenting on the struggles of a hidden history. Using his paintbrush as a flashlight, he gives his viewers a glimpse into uncharted territory, shining this light onto otherwise forgotten places. Shilling's work can be found in public & private collections worldwide, including the permanent collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Multiple Canadian Embassies, the Citadelle Art Foundation, and a portrait commission for Hart House at the University of Toronto. Travis is represented by Ingram Gallery in Toronto and Canada House Gallery in Banff. 

Shellie Zhang (b. 1991, Beijing) is an artist based in Toronto and New Haven. Working across a range of media, Zhang explores how legacies of translation, migration, and memory leave traces and impressions across bodies, materials, and images. Her work examines processes of integration and assimilation, asking how culture is learned, negotiated, sustained, and transformed through lived experience. She is interested in how symbols and iconographies shift across generations, carrying histories that are inherited and reimagined over time. Drawing on motifs of transformation and adornment from both the natural and constructed world, she investigates surfaces as perceptual thresholds that register the imprints of metamorphosis and adaptation.

Zhang has exhibited at venues including Asian Art Initiative (Philadelphia) and the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego. In 2026, she received her MFA in Sculpture at the Yale School of Art. She is a recipient of grants such as the Toronto Arts Council’s Visual Projects grant, the Ontario Arts Council’s Visual Artists Creation Grant and the Canada Council’s Project Grant to Visual Artists. Zhang was an Artist-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2017), received the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Award (2021), and was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award (2025). Her work is in public collections such as the Robert McLaughlin Gallery and the McMaster Museum of Art. Her work has been published in Frieze, Canadian Art, the Toronto Star, Blackflash Magazine, CBC Arts, and C Magazine. Zhang is a founding board member of the Toronto Chinatown Land Trust.