Akin Artists Included in blog TO's list of Up and Coming Artists
This past weekend blogTO released their list of 10 up and coming Toronto artists and many are current Akin members. The list includes Kendra Yee of Akin Ossington, Joshua Advincula, Chason Yeboah, Liang Wang of Akin MOCA, Jill Smith of Akin Dupont, Amika Cooper, Charlotte Penabel, Raquel Da Silva of Akin MOCA, Alexander Robinson, and Allana Cooper. BlogTO compiled the list of up and coming artists based on suggestions from local arts institutions and organizations. The individuals who made it onto the list are all visual creatives who have emerged on the scene in the last couple of years with some exciting work. Some of them already have a few solo exhibits under their belt, while others' CVs consist solely of group exhibits. Regardless of how many past shows these artists have done, the future looks promising (blogTO, 2019).
Continue reading to learn more about the Akin artists who made it onto the list.
Diverting Cracks Found in the Cement, 2017 by Kendra Yee
Kendra Yee
Kendra Yee is a Toronto-based artist, designer, and curator. Her work consists of mixed-media paintings, ceramic sculptures, and panel-based illustrations. Yee pulls tales from her personal history, lived experiences and collective memory to form speculative worlds where fluid characters come to life through the conversations of interactive bodies.
Yee is currently developing a program with Davenport-Perth Neighbourhood and Community Health Center that centers around alternative education. In fall 2018, selected women participants aged 13-19 in the west end area of Toronto will join together to create an independent comics anthology surrounding topics on personal identity.
Liang Wang beside his painting The Colour of the Wheat, 2017, Oil on panel, 18” x 24”
Liang Wang
Liang Wang is a Toronto-based painter raised in various parts of Taiwan, China, Australia and Canada. He has exhibited work in numerous groups shows at locations including Northern Contemporary Gallery (Toronto); Federation Gallery, Turnbull Gallery (Vancouver); and Rutherford Galleria (Edmonton). His work is in private collections in Canada and New Zealand. One day I saw the sunset forty-four times is his first solo show. Wang currently teaches painting at the McCanny Secondary School.
Us by Jill Smith, performed at Forest City Gallery, 2018, part of in attendance
Jill Smith
Jill Smith is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto, Ontario (1995). Her most recent work explores everyday absurdity, as well as the connective possibilities of materiality. By re-contextualizing familiar motifs with organic, bodily forms, her work calls into question how one both exists and performs as a social body. While Smith’s work stimulates the imagination through whimsical and nonsensical colour and form, it is the relatable, yet ambiguous materiality that offers a platform to question the familiar, and escape to the alien and the uncanny.
Detail view of work by Raquel Da Silva
Raquel Da Silva
Finishing up her degree in Painting and Furniture Design at OCAD, Da Silva's super clean and colourful acrylic paintings have caught the attention from the likes of Nike (she designed a shoe for them in August). Plus her furniture is rad too (blogTO, 2019).
