Inner Space with Emerald Repard-Dennistion

Inner Space, a monthly web series co-curated by the Inner Space Youth Advisory and AGO Staff, invites artists from across Canada to give personal tours of their studios. Giving a platform to youth curators and artists from their communities, Inner Space aims to make visible and legitimize a new generation of diverse, Canadian artists, while creating authentic youth-led digital content.
The current iteration of the Youth Advisory is project-based and is made up of youth ages 16-25 from across Canada with the goal of co-curating a series of studio tours by and for youth. Meeting bi-weekly online from October 2022-June 2023, this paid opportunity tasked the Inner Space Youth Advisory members with curating artists from their communities who they believe deserved a platform and visibility from an institutional context. The result, launched in March 2023, is a 6 episode monthly web series featuring a new generation of artists and their creative spaces from across Canada.
This month we meet artist Emerald Repard-Denniston, a visual artist based in Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam/Vancouver, and Tkaronto/Toronto. She is a multidisciplinary artist working mainly in contemporary figurative oil painting. Through her practice she plays around with topics that involve humour, cynicism and detachment.
It was incredibly meaningful for me to see an artist unapologetically embodying their Asian
identity and rejecting claustrophobic societal pressures to be something you’re not.In her paintings, Emerald disrupts one-dimensional portrayals of Asian women and the Asian monolith in favour of seething, joyous, and raucous figures. While it isn’t necessarily unusual to see someone subverting notions of societal representation, Emerald’s work does so with refreshing humour, aggression, and intellect. - Chloe Gordon-Chow: Youth Advisory Member
Follow the Series at @AGOYOUTH
Created and Facilitated by AGO Youth Programs: Sarah Febbraro & Madelyne Beckles
Edited by AGO Video Team: Fraser Wrighte
Curated in Collaboration with the Inner Space Youth Advisory.
Generously supported by The Lloyd Carr-Harris Foundation.
Music Via Soundstripe
© The Art Gallery of Ontario 2023