UPCOMING – REMNANT: 2025 MFA Graduation Exhibition

Exhibition Details

The University of Calgary’s Graduating Master of Fine Arts class of 2025 includes six outstanding artists. Through drawing, painting, photography, installation and mixed media the artists showcase their research-led creation. Organized by the Department of Art and Art History, hosted by Nickle Galleries.

• Ryanna Kizan. –  Worn Lines: Healing Though the Marked Body

• Tooba Golshani Mehr. –  Echoes of Becoming

• Yalda Jahan Panah. –  Beyond the Boundaries of Place

• Kat Pisani. –  Thread by Thread

• Fatemeh Mohammadi Shamloo. –  Your Choice

• Yekta Tarki. – Visualizing the Pyrocene: The Fort McMurray Project

Also completing an MFA degree, but showing elsewhere:

• Sydney Paquette. –  Reframing Women at Work in the Skilled Trades.  East Aldred Event Space CA121 – Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, 1301 16 Ave NW, Calgary, AB, T2M0L4.  Opening: August 20^th 5:00 – 7:30pm

RECEPTION

Join us to celebrate the achievements of all the 2025 MFA students: September 11, 2025 5:00 – 8:00pm.  Everyone Welcome.

Ryanna Kizan is an artist and painter based in Alberta, Canada. She holds a BFA from the University of Calgary and is currently completing her MFA in Painting at the same institution. Through the use of figurative oil paintings, her work explores women’s bodies within themes of care, resistance, and embodied experience, often drawing from personal narrative and feminist theories. Ryanna’s recent paintings investigate how tattoos can act as a form of bodily reclamation from internalized beauty standards and cultural expectations surrounding femininity.

Tooba Golshani Mehr is an MFA candidate at the University of Calgary, creating artworks that combine sculpture and painting. Her work investigates the notion of becoming embedded within identity, focusing on the ongoing process of change over time. Through her work, she explores how identity transforms in response to both personal experiences and the surrounding world.

Yalda Jahan Panah is an Iranian artist and MFA student at the University of Calgary. Through photography she explores the complex relationships between people, memory, and place. In her recent work she looks at the ways memory and place influence how we understand and shape the sense of belonging. She works with family archives, exploring how past and present overlap in subtle, layered ways. Yalda is also curious about how photography can move beyond traditional formats, experimenting with transparency and light to create new ways of engaging with photographic images. Through her work, she reflects on the emotional connections we carry with us and invites viewers to consider their own relationships with memory and place.

Kat Pisani is an MFA candidate at the University of Calgary whose sculptural installations recontextualize found objects to explore the emotional weight of trauma. Her research investigates how material processes can give form to lived experiences and how performance can serve as a vessel for personal healing and recovery. Centering the impact of substance addiction, her work seeks to foster understanding through affective engagement. By emphasizing the therapeutic potential of art, she advocates creative practices as meaningful tools for personal healing and coping within recovery communities.

Fatemeh Mohammadi Shamloo is an Iranian photographer currently based in Calgary, Canada. She holds a BA in Photography from Azad University, Central Tehran Branch in Iran, and is completing her MFA in Photography at the University of Calgary, where she was awarded the Alberta Foundation for the Arts graduate grant. Working primarily in documentary photography, her practice focuses on overlooked aspects of everyday life. Through themes of memory, material culture, and the emotional weight of personal belongings, Fatemeh explores how ordinary objects and spaces become markers of identity, history, and presence. Her work invites viewers to reflect on the quiet details that shape our sense of home and self.

Yekta Tarki explores the relationship between humans and nature amidst environmental crises through her drawings and paintings. She focuses on disasters caused by climate change, and over the past two years during her MFA program at the University of Calgary, she has investigated the phenomenon of wildfires, the Pyrocene or fire age, and the relationship between humans and fire in her art practice. Her artworks are inspired by scientific data on environmental crises and serve as creative visualizations of that data in a non-representational form of art.