Akin’s 2023 Career Launcher Winners Announced!
Akin is excited to announce Damon Couto-Hill and Veerta Kumar as our OCADU Career Launcher award recipients for 2023-24. We’re excited to welcome them into the community!
These talented graduating OCAD students will be awarded $2,000 in credits to go towards a studio space at one of Akin’s studio locations for 2023-2024. In addition to the $2,000 studio credit, each recipient will receive $450 exhibition credit for use at Akin’s Remote Gallery.
Image Description: Damon Couto-Hill looks directly to the camera in this close up shot of his face and shoulders. Damon has short brown hair, and brown eyes. Damon is wearing a red, blue, white and black striped collared shirt. Behind Damon is a room with white walls, out of focus.
Damon Couto-Hill is a Portuguese/Mohawk man and an interdisciplinary visual artist. He is a Six Nations of the Grand River member who grew up in Scarborough and currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada. He works with digital collages to entangle his body with images of Canada, nature, the Western art canon, and the internet to visualize the dysfunctions of Western collective consciousness through an intuitive, dream-like lens. He then translates the digital collage into physical form as fragmented wood panels painted in acrylic and oil, making the image again upon the scattered shards of a slanted mosaic.
Instagram: @damond.liver
Image Description: Veerta Kumar is smiling beside a large artwork. Veerta has curly black hair and wears a black, shirt with an asymmetrical neckline. The artwork, to Veerta’s left, are bright, colourful circles mounted on a black background. Each circle contains are backlit, translucent photographs . The circles contain photographs
Veerta Kumar was born in India in 1999 and lives and works in Toronto. She considers the flux, chaos, and fragments of our perceptions to decolonize modes of re-presentation and re-creation. In the past year, she observed the interaction of paint and light and engaged in various modes of making and materials, including ornamentation, textiles, found materials, family album photos, personal photography, and digital manipulation.
Kumar completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing and Painting in 2023 from OCAD University. She received the John Madott Fine Art Award for her recent body of work Tedhi Nazar exhibited at Grad Ex 108.
Website: www.veertakumar.ca
Instagram: @_veertakumar
