Artist Overview
Michelle Kwasnycia is a Bachelor of Fine Arts student at the University of Alberta specializing in painting and printmaking. Her work focuses on identity, culture, and presence in relation to aesthetic systems, exploring how visual language shapes and represents the bodymind amidst intersectional oppression. Informed by her experiences with chronic pain, Michelle’s work considers pain as a pedagogy capable of holding vast memory, tension, and transformation. As a process of translation, her practice renders internal states into visual form and questions how bodies carry, resist, and reconfigure meaning over time.
For the McMullen exhibition, Michelle is creating a new print installation informed both by her lived experiences and by her 2026 summer artist practicum with the Smartwear project. The work explores extraordinary forms of embodiment through the visual language of quilting. Using alternating panels of lithograph and aquatint etching, the work brings the artist’s familial history of quilting as care into conversation with how we come to visualize and understand the invisible spaces of the body.
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