There is only one month left in Year 1 of the Akin Studio Program at MOCA , a unique studio residency program in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto Canada.

Akin is honored to continue sharing profiles of the remarkable group of artists from our inaugural cohort. We have posted profiles of some of the artists throughout the summer and will continue until mid September; you can click here to see previous posts. Today we are happy to share profiles of three of the Year 1 artists, Christian Butterfield, Jamie Ellis Pasquale and Stanzie Tooth.

Christian Butterfield

Christian Butterfield is a young Torontonian artist working on the interception of mass media and the painting of the human form. Since 2016 he has been developing a series of portraits, exploring the traditions of painting and popular culture. He uses Time magazine as a source and includes text extracts onto painted faces to comment with humour on our current society. The words in his texts are signifiers in relation to the abstraction of the human figure. Christian Butterfield is represented by Corkin Gallery.

www.corkingallery.com/artists/contemporary/christian-butterfield

Jamie Ellis Pasquale

Born in London, England where he attended the University of Greenwich studying for a bachelors in Landscape Architecture. Now living and working in Toronto where his work shows a nod to the classical history of representational and figurative painting. He is currently working on personal projects and progression in the field of portraiture.

Working from observations of nature and my immediate environment Jamie Ellis Pasquale creates objects of fascination that reflect his emotions. Paintings that are belonging to the essence of life and the nature of pure being. Inspired by art history and the formal definitions of painting, Jamie continues to push the boundaries of painting both representational and abstract to reflect a contemporary idiom previously not seen before from a black british artist.

https://cargocollective.com/jamieellispasquale

Stanzie Tooth

Canadian artist Stanzie Tooth works primarily in painting, though her practice also diverges into sculpture, collage and installation. Tooth holds a BFA from the Ontario College of Art & Design (2007) and an MFA from the University of Ottawa (2015), where she was awarded an Ontario Graduate Scholarship. Stanzie was the 2015 recipient of the Joseph Plaskett Award for Painting, through which she spent time traveling and creating new work, completing residencies in Berlin and Iceland, as well as self-directed research in Greece and Italy. She has been acknowledged for her work by Canadian Art Magazine, The Toronto Star, Now Magazine and Studio Beat. Her work is included in the collections of The Royal Bank, Toronto Dominion Bank, A.T. Tolley Collection and several private collections. Stanzie Tooth currently lives in Toronto. Stanzie is represented by General Hardware Contemporary.

www.stanzietooth.com

Stay tuned next weekend as we wrap up the Akin MOCA Artist Series with our final post!