Join us on Saturday, October 4th from 11AM-12PM for a panel discussion with artists Adad Hannah, Guná Jensen and Leslie Leong on the challenges and rewards of being a working artist in Canada. Registration is not required but is preferred.
About the artists:
Adad Hannah
Adad Hannah is an artist living in Burnaby, British Columbia. He was born in New York, spent his childhood in Israel and England, and moved to Vancouver in the early 1980’s.
Mr. Hannah holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, along with a Master and Doctorate of Fine Arts, both from Concordia University in Montreal.
Mr. Hannah exhibits regularly at Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain in Montreal and Equinox Gallery in Vancouver. His works often take the form of video-recorded tableaux vivants. Through his videos, photographs, and installations, he explores the nexus of photography, video, sculpture, and performance and how the human body occupies this space. He has produced commissioned projects for museums around the world and has been the recipient of numerous grants and prizes including the Canada Council for the Arts’ Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for mid-career artists. Mr. Hannah’s work can be found in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée Rodin in Paris, the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, and the Samsung LEEUM Museum in Seoul.
Guná Jensen
Guná is of Dakhká Tlingit/Tagish Khwáan Ancestry from the Dahk’laweidi Clan. She honours her ancestral Tlingit art form while merging formline into a bold contemporary vision. Trained by masters like William Wasden and Mike Dangeli, and educated at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, she channels her culture into art that challenges and confronts, shaping her unique approach to visual storytelling.
Her work, recognized with awards like the William and Meredith Sanderson Prize for Emerging Canadian Artists, has been shown in galleries across Canada. Guná has shared her knowledge through lectures and workshops at institutions such as Princeton, Emily Carr, and Stellenbosch, where she explores themes of cultural theft, decolonization, healing. For Guná, art is activism—a call to respect, protect, and empower. Guná is committed to utilizing her art as a powerful voice for Tlingit sovereignty, therefore inviting audiences to honour Indigenous resilience.
Leslie Leong
My art practice began in photography and ceramics over 40 years ago. Today I employ a variety of expressive forms often using unorthodox materials, forcing me to adopt non-traditional techniques. This results in a more open-ended process, sending me on a journey of enquiry and exploration.
I am inquisitive and I have an obsessive drive to create. Currently the result is work that ponders a future with artificial intelligence, wearable technology, embeddable implants and human augmentation. With technology’s ability to accelerate tasks and production, I am worried by the inability of humans to manage the current pace of life and its extreme excesses. In reaction, I can often be found rummaging recycling stations and landfill sites for materials to reuse and repurpose into my art forms.