York University Libraries will be hosting an Indigenous Student Art Show from November 5, 2025 to November 28th, 2025. The art show is a way to continue placemaking in the library. This initiative showcases Indigenous students’ talent and skill and provides students with the opportunity to continue to collaborate on the design of Miinkaanensing the Indigenous Reading Room. Seven student artists will be showing their art, and three pieces will be chosen by a committee for permanent display. Please continue reading to learn more about the seven artists and their artwork featured in our show!
Grace Devries
Grace Devries
Beadwork and recycled materials, 12" x 12"
Artist’s Statement
Flourishing Genesis Beauty is found profoundly in nature. It is subtle and gentle, yet strong and powerful. There is an inner majesty in all creation and to sustain this artistry we must protect it. My work explores the importance of nature and our direct relationship to it. Through beading techniques and the use of recycled materials, I highlight both the beauty that surrounds us and the ways in which our consumerist culture threatens it. Beading is a slow and calming exercise and is deeply tied to my Métis heritage, as it combines traditional Indigenous quillwork and European embroidery styles. This combination of styles is a reflection of my own identity within the Indigenous community. I hope to not only capture nature's allure, but to emphasize how essential it is to our lives. I wish to inspire others to step into nature, slow down and take a step back from our fast-paced culture and to reconnect with the world set before us.
Artist’s Biography
Grace Devries was born and raised in Barrie, Ontario, and identifies with the Metis community. For much of her life, Grace has been experimenting with a range of mediums, including traditional painting and drawing techniques as well as collage, to create expressive and cohesive artworks. She is currently completing her BA in Visual Arts at York University. Grace typically works with mediums such as oil and acrylic paint. In 2025, she has been experimenting with beading and textile layering methods, as seen in the works of other Métis beading and embroidery artists, such as Jennine Krauchi. Grace’s practice displays a connection between materials and meaning, and how they both come together to display a formulated work.
Utilizing beading, embroidery, and textile layering, she invites viewers to reconsider their relationship and connection to the natural world. She shows that creation isn’t just individualistic but rather is an act of ecological greatness. Grace chooses to explore nature’s beauty and her Indigenous identity simultaneously through the meditative and soothing process of beading. By using both new and reclaimed materials, she is also able to critique consumer culture and its effect on the environment, calling for deeper mindfulness and reflection.
Jordan Fiegehen
Artist’s Statement
This piece entitled “I am Still Here and I am Not Alone” is a sign of strength and resilience, whose paths are both different and yet the same. My attachment to Bear Clan has been passed down by my mother, and when I began my beading journey, all I wanted to do was create a polar bear for her. To me, bears represent the ferocity and resilience my mother, and everyone who came before her, has.
Artist’s Biography
Jordan Fiegehen is a fourth-year student of Batchewana First Nation, currently undertaking her second undergrad degree at York University. She is an Anthropology major with a minor in Indigenous Studies, and her academic interests include research deep-dives, and the anthropological study of hauntology. Outside of academia, her interests include coffee, and long walks with her dog.
Jordan Fiegehen
Beadwork, 25cm x 25cm
Tori Gosse
Tori Gosse
Contrapuntal Poem in wooden frame, 12" x 12"
Artist’s Statement
My poem engages with the Mi'kmaq language by only using letters present in the Mi'kmaq alphabet, cleaving and substituting others to explore absence, adaptation, and the tension between languages. Through this constraint, the work reflects on cultural memory and how language can both fracture and reclaim identity. Written in fall 2023 and later framed in September 2025, the piece sits within a hand-painted birch-bark–inspired frame, textured with crackle medium to evoke living wood and the land of Mi’kma’ki. Together, the poem and frame honour rootedness, transformation, and the endurance of language across time.
Artist’s Biography
Tori Gosse is a writer from Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland), now based in Ontario. Her work explores the intersections of science, art, and Mi'kmaq identity. A two-time recipient of the York University President's Award in Poetry (2023–2024, 2024–2025) and recipient of the 2023–2024 Priscila Uppal Award, she’s also a finalist for The Fiddlehead's 2024 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Contest for her poem UNSINKABLE. Her poetry appears in The Bangalore Review and Frontier Poetry and is forthcoming in PRISM International (Issue 63.3).
Matthew Johns
Artist’s Statement
This work is based on a kept photograph of my great-grandfather, Gowandehsonh (William Andrew Johns), who survived the Mohawk Institute in Brantford (mush hole), the longest-running and among the most famously brutal Residential schools. Other members of my family also attended industrial day schools. They spoke their languages before entering residential schools, and they left unwilling to speak them again. My family carried that shame, telling people we're of European descent instead of Indigenous. I was born the day my great-grandfather died. Beginning with this photograph digitally, I divided the photo into triangles, sampling the average colour within each shape. By splitting triangles along their heights and layering fragments, the image becomes both broken and whole, abstracted yet grounded in memory. The process mirrors a fractured identity, pieced together through loss, silence, resilience, and continuity. My intention is to honour my family while also acknowledging the disruption of language, culture, and belonging caused by oppression. The geometric fracturing suggests both disintegration and reconstruction, evoking my personal journey of connecting with heritage and a sense of self.
Artist’s Biography
Matthew Johns is a downtown Toronto-based technology specialist and student of life, of Mohawk and French-Canadian heritage. Matthew's work in the artistic realm explores how digital tools can reshape the stories and symbols that define modern ideas; with digital painting, content re-use, and media editing to investigate the narrative potential of contemporary information flows.
After earning an Advanced Diploma in Computer Engineering Technology from Conestoga College, they are completing a Specialized Honours degree in Financial & Business Economics at York University, with plans to pursue a Master's of Art in Economics.
Matthew is drawn to the intersections of aesthetics, data, and the evocation of expression.
Matthew Johns
Photography
tiva kawakami
tiva kawakami
Stills from the digital version of a micro film installation
Artist’s Statement
These are five pairs of stills from a microfilm installation, Home in blue. I made these microfilms through a daily practice of filming in the backyard of the rooming house I rent in central Tkaronto/Toronto. Through this project, I learned about the aliveness of the river buried underneath this property and the garden as a palimpsest. My archaeological curiosity oriented me toward plants and garbage, all of which precede my time here. I wanted to speculate on which plants came to this place intentionally, who brought them here (or maybe some plants came on their own terms), and why? I tried some new-to-me recipes: burdock tea and roasted thistle root, for example. And I tried to play with time: slowing down and rejecting linear time to foster practices of healing. I made these microfilms to help me think about how I should participate in and care for life in Tkaronto/Toronto: as a Settler-Michif woman not from these Lands, as a student not staying here long-term, but as someone with everyday access to this particular garden.
Artist’s Biography
Sativa Kawakami (she/her) is a Settler-Michif woman born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She is a proud sister, daughter, cousin, and urban fruit tree enthusiast. While in Toronto to do her Master’s in Environmental Studies, tiva has focused on making films, field recordings, and plant pressings. Her art practice helps her think through her situated responsibilities, how she attends to relationships, and expressions of home.
Marissa Magneson
Artist’s Statement
ipâhkêpayiw (s/he ascends or reaches a higher level) honours the journey of Indigenous students in post-secondary education. Through beadwork, it recognizes the persistence, brilliance, and courage required to move within and beyond colonial institutions like the university. Each bead marks an upward movement, an individual stride toward the future, forming a mosaic of teachings, stories, and acts of reclamation. ispâhkêpayiw celebrates the continual act of rising; not only within academia, but within identity, community, and spirit.
Artist’s Biography
Marissa Magneson is a Cree-Métis artist, educator, and workshop facilitator with Red River roots. Her practice centres on beadwork, visual storytelling, and cultural reclamation through art. Weaving together ancestral knowledge and contemporary expression, she explores themes of identity, land, and Indigenous resurgence. Marissa holds a BFA (Honours) and MA in Indigenous Studies and is currently a PhD candidate at York University where she is researching “Beadwork as Pedagogy,” while developing educational beaded bundles in which she mobilizes in classrooms throughout the GTA. Alongside her studies, she teaches, freelances, and sells her art. Marissa is inspired by the legacy of her maternal Métis grandmother, Elaine Jessop (Desjarlais), whose lifelong advocacy for Indigenous women’s rights continues to drive her own work.
Marissa Magneson
Beadwork on melton framed with wood, 12" x 12"
Jennifer Sedgewick
Jennifer Sedgewick
Contemporary glass beads, antique French steel-cut beads, abalone shell, vintage silk velvet, fishing line, leather, melton cloth, 8" x 10"
Artist’s Statement
Inspired by the name and meaning of the Indigenous Reading Room – Miinkaanensing, "at the seed" – this piece depicts the life cycle of a plant that carries teachings across many Indigenous Nations: the strawberry. Ode'imin (Anishinaabemowin), ken'niiohontésha (Kanien'kéha), mitêhimin (nēhiyawēwin), or "heart berries" visually depict growth and renewal after our long winters, as they are the first fruit to ripen during the spring. Akin to how the Miinkaanensing is meant to represent the growth and potential for the relationship between First Nations, Métis, and Inuit at York University, this mixed-media artwork may symbolize the growth and potential of us students utilizing the Indigenous Reading Room while on our personal and academic journeys.
Artist’s Biography
Jennifer Sedgewick is a Michif/Métis (citizen of Métis Nation - Saskatchewan; Local 126) and Canadian settler who is loud and proud to be from the Prairies. Born and raised in Saskatoon (Treaty 6/Saskatchewan), Jenn's Michif family names include Fiddler, Henry, and Delorme, and her ancestral Métis communities include Nordale/Prince Albert, Fish Creek in the South branch Settlement, and St. Francois Xavier in the Red River Settlement. In her beading practice, she prioritizes the very Métis practice of using second hand, upcycled, and found materials. This practice informs the name of her beading business – Second Love Beads.
Email Cora Coady ccoady@yorku.ca if you have any questions or comments.