Art
'Masked bride' reveals identity, holds domestic violence-themed art exhibit in Saskatoon – CBC.ca
A Saskatoon woman who arranged a performance art piece across the globe has decided to share her story through a unique art exhibit in the city.
It’s called To Whom It May Concern and features a collection of photographs and letters which address the rise of domestic violence during COVID-19.
The project was started by Natalie Feheregyhazi in Toronto a few years ago.
Feheregyhazi dressed up in a wedding dress with a white mask covering her entire face. She would sit in various places in the city and write letters to be left where she was sitting.
She was given the nickname ‘Toronto’s Masked Bride’ as her identity remained anonymous.
Feheregyhazi said the idea to do an art project about a bride had been in her mind for several years prior to the performance art piece but some experiences in 2015 and 2016 inspired the final project.
She said one of the experiences happened after a brief conversation with a local artist, Daniel O’Shea, in a shop in Saskatoon.
“[He] showed me a painting he had done for a friend of his who had recently been murdered in a domestic violence situation,” Feheregyhazi said.
The woman in question was Beverly Littlecrow, a 36-year-old woman who the Crown prosecutor argued had been a victim of manslaughter at the hands of her spouse Gabriel Faucher in 2016.
In 2018, Faucher was found not guilty of manslaughter in the death of Littlecrow as the judges could not rule out the possibility of Littlecrow’s injuries having been accidental. The appeal of Faucher’s acquittal was dismissed earlier this year.
“We talked about this painting and he ended up gifting it to me because he said he didn’t know what to do with it,” Feheregyhazi said. “He felt it was meant to go to me.
“I really feel like Beverly’s spirit has been with this project since that moment.”
Leaving a dangerous relationship
Feheregyhazi said getting the painting coincided with her leaving a dangerous relationship after she had found out “all sorts of kind of terrifying things” about her partner who she had been with for eight years.
“It was a whole host of things that had happened kind of simultaneously and when it came to that summer and that spring, I didn’t know how to process all of this,” Feheregyhazi said. “And that’s when all of the pieces kind of came together.”
She said she knew the bride in the project had to be masked, and had to be voiceless, because she didn’t know how to express it otherwise.
Feheregyhazi said she didn’t want people to know who she was since the project involved her leaving notes around Toronto with real life stories, and she did not want the stories to be brought back to the people they involved.
She described the letters she left around the city as love letters, as the experiences she was trying to express in the art piece had to do with abusers being loved by the people they abuse.
“That conflict, that love is really what keeps us kind of caught in these cycles and I mean it’s complicated,” Feheregyhazi said. “There are a lot of elements to it and sometimes it’s fear and sometimes it’s unfortunate conditioning but it’s also love.”
She said she hoped that through writing in this uncensored and spontaneous manner it would bring to light the positive feelings often felt in abusive relationships which make it harder for victims to leave.
“One day and one moment you’re remembering the beautiful anniversary you had or that time when it was snowing, like it currently is in Saskatoon, and you decided to cuddle up and watch five movies in a row and just be loving,” Feheregyhazi said.
“Versus being assaulted, being yelled at, being sexually violated, those are the things that don’t get addressed nearly often enough when we talk about domestic or intimate forms of violence.”
The performance art project took Feheregyhazi to many places including Europe and Africa. She said she met many people, including men and people with mental illnesses, who shared their stories with her.
“What strikes me is how deep our collective longing for kindness and connection and love is,” She said. “Sometimes I didn’t catch everything but they would come and identify with the vulnerability of the figure that was just there to kind of listen, it wasn’t speaking it created the space for them to share.”
She said many people came up to her to share intimate and painful parts of their lived experiences with her and she just listened.
“There was kind of a silent agreement of trust [and] these stories are confessed and shared because no one knew who I was.”
Taking the mask off
Feheregyhazi said the reason she now decided to take the mask off and attach her name to the project has to do with the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’re living in a situation where since the quarantine went into effect domestic violence has been on the rise,” she said. “And this is all happening in very confined, restricted basis.
“People who are already isolated are even more isolated and have less easy access to help.”
She said the exhibit in Saskatoon, which runs until Nov. 29, touches on some young women who died in the spring and summer of this year due to alleged domestic violence.
One of those women is Tina Tingley-McAleer who was killed in her home in Hillsborough, N.B., in May. Police arrested her partner, Calvin Andrew Lewis, and charged him with first-degree murder.
Feheregyhazi said the exhibit also includes on Darian Hailey Henderson-Bellman, a 25-year-old woman from Brampton, Ont., who was allegedly shot to death by her boyfriend Darnell Reid in August.
The last woman who is honoured in the art exhibit is Brittney Ann Meszaros. The 24-year-old Calgary woman was found dead in her home in April, and her common-law boyfriend, Alexander Moskaluk, was charged with manslaughter.
“I really hope [the exhibit] will bring to surface a reminder of who these people were like these aren’t just statistics they’re mothers, they’re sisters, they’re friends and they got caught in a situation that for some reason socially we still tolerate to some degree,” Feheregyhazi said.
“I don’t know why we mind our own business when we hear something going on or how we’ve been conditioned to kind of just accept that there’s a certain level of violence that women and girls may encounter.”
The To Whom It May Concern art exhibit is in Saskatoon at 20th Street West at Avenue E and is free to view.
“I hope people will be moved to ask and demand that these kinds of violences come to an end once and for all.”
If you need help and are in immediate danger, call 911. To find assistance in your area, visit sheltersafe.ca or endingviolencecanada.org/getting-help. In Saskatchewan, pathssk.org has listings of available services across the province.
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Unique art collection on display CTV News Vancouver
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Art
This N.B. artist joined an online movement. Now her art is being shown across the world. – CBC.ca
Since joining a community that dreams of an internet free from giant corporations that can exploit users’ time and data, Victoria West’s digital artwork has been exhibited across the globe.
West, a photographer and digital artist based in Burton, 30 kilometres southeast of Fredericton, has had her work shown in Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Townsville in northeastern Australia, Miami, New York City, and even a museum in Albuquerque, N.M., — all through connections she’s made in Web3.
West warned it was a “rabbit hole,” but what she found in wonderland she doesn’t believe she’d find anywhere else.
Web3 is a future version of the internet.
The work of Victoria West, a photographer and digital artist based in Burton, was recently showcased at an immersive exhibit in the Big Apple.
Web1, West said, was the first version of the internet, in which users passively consumed information.
As the 2000s dawned, Web2 emerged, and users could now post their own content — think Twitter, blogs, YouTube. People are now creating more and more in digital spaces, but the downside of Web2 is that corporations are technically still the owners of all that creation, and they could take your data and potentially do with it as they please.
Enter Web3, which still exists more in theory: nobody and everybody owns the internet. This version aims to be decentralized. It doesn’t eradicate the distrust some people have in mega companies like Google and Meta — it just removes the need for it, because no one person or organization can own the blockchain Web3 operates on.
West said within Web3 there’s an art movement, with artists working together and taking control of their work. Imagine if Leonardo da Vinci had an internet connection, as well as Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello. It’s the renaissance all over again, West said, except it’s happening with digital art.
“And it’s happening online on a much bigger scale.”
Before learning about W3 in 2021, West said she was in a photography bubble.
Photography isn’t the art form West imagined herself pursuing when she was younger. But when she bought a camera after the first commercial digital models arrived on the market in the mid-2000s, she was hooked.
“I was bothering everybody around me to take their portrait,” she said.
She built up her portraiture business, becoming involved with the Professional Photographers of Canada and competing in photography contests. Still, West didn’t want to just capture moments — she wanted to make them.
That’s when artificial intelligence came on the scene.
West was using Midjourney, a generative AI program, when it was still in beta testing. Around the same time she became involved with Web3, she experimented with blending AI-produced textures into her photography. In her business, AI quickened her workflow and allowed her to change backdrops and furniture.
While creating a piece in 2023 called When I Die, West wanted to design a man underground with roots blossoming into a tree. Well, there aren’t any blossoming trees in Canada in February, West joked — so she made the tree using AI.
“I feel like someone took handcuffs off me, and I’m free,” she said.
Lauren Cruikshank, an associate professor in culture and media studies at the University of New Brunswick, has spoken about the use of AI in universities, but she also thinks about it through an artistic lens.
From the camera to spell check, Cruikshank said the same discussion happens with each new medium: how much of the artistry belongs to the artist, how much to the tools they’re using?
“For some people where it gets uncomfortable is where the role of the human is minimal compared to how much the AI tool is creating or having creative influence,” she said.
With AI, Cruikshank agreed there are degrees — there’s a difference between prompting an AI to generate an image of a beautiful sunset and claiming it as your artwork and what West is doing, combining AI with her own artistry.
“That sounds really compelling to me,” Cruikshank said.
When West first saw Lume Studios on Broadway in lower Manhattan, the place she’d eventually display Eden’s Dye, her immersive art exhibit, she knew she wanted it immediately.
She collaborated on the exhibit with some of her Web3 friends. Los Angeles actors and poets Laurence Fuller and Vincent D’Onofrio wrote poetry to accompany each piece of art, which West created using both photography and AI. A coder friend joined the crew, and the result was a floor-to-ceiling immersive exhibit. West’s collaborators also choreographed performances to complement the art, using music produced by AI.
“Why wouldn’t I do that if I can?” West asked. “It’s freeing, I think, and lets you push the boundaries of photography and what you can do with it.”
While the exhibit leaned heavily on romantic, classical themes and Baroque aesthetics, Eden’s Dye is almost a premonition: minted, digital artwork taking up entire walls in people’s homes, flowers growing from code, experiencing art in virtual realms.
Demand will only grow, West said. Technology will progress and the internet will change. But what she really wanted was for people to walk into Eden’s Dye and be amazed by the art they were experiencing.
“They came because of the art, and they were there enjoying the art. You don’t really need to understand anything beyond that.”
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These aren’t your grandma’s quilts.
Being a grandmother herself, Lorna Costantini said she’s not a huge fan of the above phrase, but she can’t help but use it to describe modern quilting.
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