The Masculine Lived Experience is the second instalment of a two-part exhibition. Eighteen artists from across Canada are featured in the exhibitions, and each of these artists articulates a visual narrative of how social norms as well as traditions, learned behaviours and stereotypes impact self-perception and lived experience.

Each of us is impacted by social norms, which are “expectation[s] about appropriate behaviour in a group context. . . Norms not only detail what is appropriate behaviour, but these expectations in turn define what the group does, and who the group is.”  Social norms can influence who we become, how we see the world and how we treat others. For example, they can be a cause of prejudice, as “about half of all prejudiced attitudes are based only on the need to conform.”

This exhibition aims to communicate the personal impact social norms can have within contemporary society. The Masculine Lived Experience features nine introspective artists exploring the subjective influence of societal constructs. Contributing artist John Onyschuk says, “In my previous projects, I've delved into masculine fantasies found in entertainment and violent conflicts. I examined historical paraphernalia surrounding war and discovered similar patterns in modern conflicts, where fantasy narratives cross into real-world scenarios. This new work represents a culmination of these past ideas—critiquing oppressive hierarchies and dystopian futures cultivated by masculine subcultures—with a shift in focus to something intimately familiar: the oil industry in my home province.” John’s piece Carbon Capture features a life-size wooden figure lying in a contemporary sarcophagus-like structure. Pipes extend outward from the metal platform and are attached to a series of aluminum vessels, visually conveying the complex impact that industry has on the male lived experience.

The Masculine Lived Experience invites the viewer to contemplate how oppressive social norms have shaped the past and the present and, importantly, how they might shape the future. They also challenge the viewer to reexamine their own social biases. Contributing artist Craig Le Blanc explains, “My practice reveals a long-standing interest in vulnerability, bravado, ego, loss and façade. In 1996 I began an extended focus on masculinity, work that examined the burden of socially constructed ideals upon what it means to be male.”

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About the Artists:

Kylie Fineday

Kylie Fineday is a nehiyaw (Plains Cree) artist and curator who grew up in Sweetgrass First Nation, a small community in rural Saskatchewan. Kylie completed the BFA-Art Studio program at the University of Lethbridge in 2020 and is now an MFA candidate at the University of Victoria. Fineday’s conceptual practice focuses on themes of personal identity, family history, as well as addressing social and environmental issues and injustices, particularly those affecting Indigenous communities within Canada. Through a queer Plains Cree perspective, Fineday also uses natural materials in temporary installations and performance to exemplify a relationship with the non-human world that is based on reciprocity and kinship. Fineday’s material practice is multidisciplinary, and includes drawing, photography, video, performance, sculpture, and textiles such as sewing and beadwork, as well as explorations with materials harvested from the natural world.

Shane Golby

Shane Golby has been a practicing artist for over forty years. For the first twenty years of his artistic practice Gol by focused on still-life and landscape subjects, rendered in a realist manner and influenced by his travels and employment as a high schoolteacher in the southern African region, northern Alberta, and the Canadian Arctic.

In 1997 Golby returned to the University of Alberta as a special student in the Faculty of Fine Arts. His university studies involved printmaking, acrylic painting and clay figuratives culpture and profoundly influenced his artistic concerns and style. Over the past two decades he has embraced a collage and mixed media style of expression to explore personal experiences and socio-political concerns.

Golby’s art work has been exhibited in a number of exhibitions throughout Edmonton and Alberta since2000. His work was included in the Edmonton group exhibitions Brighton Block 2 in 2019 and a University of Alberta alumni exhibition in 2013. His work has also been featured in the solo exhibitions When Love Comes to Town, 2015, Scott Gallery, Edmonton; Just Put Your Paws Up, Edmonton Exposure Festival, 2011 (also exhibited at Augustana University, Camrose, January, 2012); Signs of Desire: Becoming Queer in Word and Image,2009, Latitude 53 Contemporary Visual Culture, Edmonton; Bath House, Edmonton’s Exposure Festival, 2008; Little Men, Harcourt House Arts Centre, Edmonton, 2007); River’s Edge, 2006, Fringe Gallery, Edmonton; and un Natural Constructs, an exhibition with C.W. Carson at the University of Alberta, Faculty of Extension, 2001.

In 2016 Golby was one of three short-listed artists for the Eldon and Anne Foote Edmonton Arts Award. His artwork is represented in the collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, by Art Sales and Rental Gallery (Art Gallery of Alberta) and in private collections in Canada, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and South Africa.

Aron Hill

Working as an artist educated in a Eurocentric tradition, I consider my personal story in relation to settler colonialism, domestic labor and care, and the artistic lineages of formalism and minimalism. My work centers around concerns of materiality, construction, and personal narrative. I approach canvas not as a passive surface to be painted on, but as a textile object in itself—something physical and tactile, something to be cut, sewn, embroidered, and glued.

This process reflects the reality of making work around children in a domestic environment. The crudeness and immediacy of collage, the use of everyday materials and handwork, speak to that rhythm. There’s a narrative running through the work that explores care and separation—what it means to have an integrated, de-compartmentalized art and craft practice, and what family and community really consist of.

The work becomes a presentation of my life in its entirety: my education, my background, my family, and my day-to-day experiences. All of this is woven into the narrative of pieces like The Northern Minister Devoured, Lake of Fire, Pack Animal, and others.

One recurring symbol in the work is the mule—a non-reproductive animal historically valued for its life of labor. It’s become central for me, representing a kind of care that isn’t necessarily tied to reproduction. The mule points to labor as love, effort as value, and the idea that care doesn’t require a biological claim to matter.

Johnathan Onyschuk

Johnathan Onyschuk is a settler based on Treaty 7 territory. Holding an MFA from Western University, London, and a BFA from Alberta University of the Arts, Calgary, Onyschuk is currently the Sculpture Facilitator at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. His work has been exhibited at spaces across Canada, including Support,(London, ON); The Lily, (Calgary, AB); Ed Video (Guelph, ON); Lowlands Project Space (Edmonton, AB) and Art Lab (London, ON). Onyschuk’s sculptural practice draws from mass culture, history, and speculative futures, often focusing on the material and psychological impacts of militarism, and resource extraction. 

Artist Statement

My work begins from the conditions of being shaped by systems we cannot opt out of. I am interested in how identity, ideology, and emotional life are formed not through explicit belief, but through infrastructure: economic, industrial, and aesthetic. These structures rarely show themselves directly; instead, they surface through habits of thought, ambient dread, and an inability to imagine alternatives. Sculpture, for me, is a way of giving form to that ambient pressure, not by illustrating it directly, but through the surface, weight, and behavior of materials.

I’m drawn to objects and forms that hold a tension between survival and denial. Containers, vessels, supports, filters, things that imply a function but don’t quite fulfill it. The work sits somewhere between the functional and the fossilized. I often think of these sculptures as expressions of systems that are still running but have already failed. What interests me is not collapse in the cinematic sense, but stagnation: the cultural stasis of a society too invested in its own undoing to change course.

I return to objects shaped by survival and violence: tools, fragments of infrastructure, things built to endure but already in decline. War relics, pipelines, obsolete machines—these carry more than function. They carry memory, direction, and belief. What draws me to these forms is how belief becomes embedded in the surface of things, through wear, design, and the way materials reflect systems long after those systems have broken down.

‍Matt Semenok

Matt Semenok is an artist born and raised in Medicine Hat, AB who is currently attending Alberta University of the Arts for a major in Painting. His career as a serious artist started with being part of the local music scene. This allowed him the opportunity to start doing commission work ranging from digital art, illustrations, and paintings in a career that continues to this day. This rejuvenation in wanting to create artwork motivated him to seek academic opportunities and enroll in a Bachelor of Applied Arts at Medicine Hat College. His studies focused on painting, illustration, figure drawing, and multi -medium drawing within the Art and Design Department.

Matt’s first prominent body of work titled, “The Void Calls For Me” which is destructive ways to apply paint to a surface through an intuitive process. This would lead to their current body of work that centered around the deep emotions, trauma, and mental health. While completing their degree Matt was encouraged by Poul Nielsen, a local artist and former Medicine Hat College instructor to pursue a master’s degree in painting with the goal to teach one day. In addition to their academic commitments, Matt promotes their career through exhibition opportunities, public art and commissions.

Cyrus Smith Bio

Cyrus Smith (b. 1976) is a Canadian visual artist formerly based in Europe, now residing in Winnipeg, MB. Smith holds a B.F.A. Hon. from the University of Manitoba. Smith is primarily a painter, but navigates effortlessly through various media. Having an extensive background in street art, Smith borrows from popular culture and addresses several themes through out his work including art history, the socio-political sphere, Graffiti, advertising, faux-fame, the occult and digital networking. Smith was a founding member of the art collective Too Sicks, which gained notoriety from installing small wooden panel paintings (Prefabs) throughout public spaces. Smith’s work has been featured in publications including Border Crossings Magazine, Toro Magazine, The National Post, and The Globe and Mail; and has contributed as a freelance writer and arts reviewer to the website Bpigs. He has been involved with numerous exhibitions, public art, and performance projects throughout Canada, the United States, and Europe. Smith has given lectures and workshops detailing the risk of alienation and suppression of Graffiti Art. His work is included in collections worldwide.

Migueltzinta Solís

Migueltzinta Solís is a trans Chicanx interdisciplinary artist, writer, scholar, filmmaker, educator, Tarot practitioner, and consultant. He was raised in California and Oaxaca by parents involved in the Chicano/a Movement during the 80s and 90s. He works at a unique intersection of creative arts practice, critical studies, and research creation. Migueltzinta writes across multiple genres and forms, working towards counter-institutional poetics for knowledge mobilization. Theme parks, amateur porn, Indigenous futurities, parallel realities, divination technologies, colonial imaginaries, queer materialities, and (un)belonging have been recurring themes. Materially, he has worked in performance, video, photography, leather, textile, installation, and painting. Migueltzinta holds an MFA in Art and a PhD in Cultural, Social and Political Thought from the University of Lethbridge/Iniskim in Treaty 7, traditional Blackfoot territory.

Paul Zacharias

Paul Zacharias received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Manitoba in 1999. He has exhibited his work across Canada and internationally. He has also worked for 20 years in film as a Scenic Artist on more than fifty films working in Quebec, Manitoba, British Columbia and Saskatchewan. From 2014 to 2019 Zacharias was owner and director of LANTERN, a contemporary art gallery in Winnipeg. In 2019 he closed the gallery to focus on his art practice.

“While I was directing LANTERN I ran across clients who desired large, macho, expensive artworks with a certain exotic cachet to them.  As time went by are actionary series of works formed in my head. It began with the desire to create art that checks all those boxes for these clients. I toyed with the idea of creating a fake artistic identity and a body of work to sell to these guys. Ethical issues and time constraints kept that idea in dreamland. But after I closed the gallery the fake artist still haunted me, and I set about making these works in earnest.”

Zacharias’ paintings employ a lot of metallic paint. Subjects float on heavily textured, gawdy, gold landscapes. Recent histories (North American frontiers) are acted out, always within in the shadow of older histories (of European colonialism).Figures often stare directly at the viewer-like medieval religious icons- both in accusation and as co-conspirator. In these figure’s eyes, one sees a confrontational moment; where both parties, the icon and the viewer, have a split second to recognize the other. There is a fear of exposure and a threat of violence.

Violence and desire are themes that both the fuel and obscure the social criticisms at work in these paintings. Nudes and macho cowboys on rich golden landscapes appeal on a base level. However, hidden under these cowboy hats lie critical narratives about our broader history.

Craig Le Blanc

My art practice reveals a long-standing interest in vulnerability, bravado, ego, loss and façade. In 1996 I began an extended focus on masculinity, work that examined the burden of socially constructed ideals upon what it means to be male. In2016 I redirected this investigation to explore identity politics more broadly, using confessional narratives that both parody and celebrate the perpetual reshaping of subjectivity with the exhibition She Loves Me. He Loves Me Not., presented in May of 2016 at the Reach Gallery Museum in Abbotsford, BC and dc3 Art Projects in Edmonton in the fall of that year.

My works negotiate the tension between protective veneer and blatant exposure. I create robust and structured forms that mirror the gendered stereotypes they allude to such as aggressivity, virility, competitiveness, while simultaneously inverting those assumptions.

In the mid-nineties I studied painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design until a transformative period at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. This time, aligned with peers and the direct influence of Vincent Barré, Annette Messager and Christian Boltanski, altered my perspective toward artmaking leading me to generate work wrapped in concept and gender. I later received an MFA in Computational Media Design from the University of Calgary.

I have found success in the public art realm, creating three large scale pieces from 2010-2016,including the Edmonton Arts Council project (Henri 2010) which won an Americans for the Arts/Public Art Network Year in Review award for 2011. I have exhibited extensively within Canada and have works in several private, corporate and municipal collections. I live and work in Edmonton, AB.