EXPERIMENTAL CONCEPTS

Image by SPAO alum Ariel Lando

SPAO’s Concept Classes provide an invaluable opportunity to connect directly with renowned artists and explore four critical photographic genres: landscape/architecture, documentary, still life, and portraiture.

The Experimental Concepts class alternates between guest lectures by contemporary artists and hands-on studio workshops that encourage creative risk-taking.

This eight-week masterclass invites students to expand their understanding of photography by experimenting with materials, processes, and unconventional image-making techniques. Through demonstrations, guided exercises, and discussions of historical and contemporary artists, students will investigate alternative photographic processes, mixed media, sculptural approaches, image intervention, and camera-based experimentation. Emphasizing curiosity over technical perfection, the course encourages participants to push the boundaries of the photographic medium while developing a personal experimental practice.

  • Digital Photography I: Foundation or equivalent experience.

MASTERCLASS: EXPERIMENTAL CONCEPTS
OCTOBER 21 - DECEMBER 9
October 21, 28, November 4, 11, 18, 25, December 2, 9
WEDNESDAYS 6PM - 9PM
8 SESSIONS - 24 HOURS
LOCATION: SPAO STUDIO
INSTRUCTOR: NEEKO PALUZZI
LEVEL: INTERMEDIATE | $585 
MAX 10 STUDENTS 

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GUEST SPEAKERS

SANDRA BREWSTER

Sandra employs a range of media to engage concepts of movement that express an internal relationship with identity. Her work is grounded in people of the Caribbean diaspora, who maintain a relationship with “back home”. Born to Guyanese parents, she is interested in a multilayered sense of being made up of a collision between geographies and temporalities.

MICHELLE SOUND

Michelle’s practice includes a variety of mediums including photo based work, textiles, painting and Indigenous material practices. Her artwork often explores her Cree and Métis identity. She works with traditional and contemporary materials and techniques to explore maternal labour, identity, cultural knowledge, and cultural inheritances.

ELSA FRANCES WIEBE

Elsa’s practice is based in observation, collection and mindful curation of photographic moments and materials, as well as creation through experimentation. By repurposing textiles, they explore the relationship between material and memory, incorporating them with the photographic process to alter the past, present, and future of the materials and memories.

DON KWAN

Don is a third-generation Chinese Canadian, who turns to his own experiences and challenges of being a gay, East Asian artist as a way to ground in broader conversations about identity, representations, and intergenerational memory-making in the diaspora.