Anna Gaby-Trotz X Richelle Forsey
Anna Gaby-Trotz is a printmaker and photographer whose work critically explores social issues, identity, and the natural environment. With an MFA in Printmaking from The University of Alberta, her practice centers on the transformative power of art, particularly in creating inclusive spaces for marginalized communities. Anna has worked on significant community projects, such as Be Our Ally with Sheatre, addressing homophobia among rural youth. She also founded The Queer Print Project at The University of Guelph, where she teaches screen printing and fosters a supportive, creative environment for queer artists.
From 2015 to 2021, Anna served as Technical Director at Open Studio in Toronto, where she initiated the North/South Printmaking Residency with The West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative and has overseen numerous creative projects with national and international artists. She has collaborated with artists, including Tim Pitsiulak and Ningiukulu Teevee, recently printing several projects in collaboration with Namara Projects and The West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative.
Anna’s recent print based work Baseline was shown at Open Studio in Toronto. Her upcoming collaboration with Richelle Forsey, The Landscape is Dead can be seen at the CAFKA.25 biennial. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.
Anna has taught at The University of Alberta, The Ontario College of Art and Design University and is currently an Assistant Professor in Studio Art at The University of Guelph.
Richelle Forsey (she/her) is an interdisciplinary process-based artist, writer, and photographer. Her practice is rooted in storytelling, fascination with the built environment, seeking beauty, and aleatory outputs. Forsey’s practice employs digital strategies and analogue processes to investigate photographic possibilities in the contemporary image-led environment, communicate stories, and examine human activity on the landscape. Through her work she explores themes of resilience, power, grief, exploration, and slow looking to create and develop outputs that bring people together, prompt contemplation, and share stories. She often works collaboratively, from a multidisciplinary and experimental approach.
In 2022 her ongoing film-based project Urban Remains, showcasing abandoned spaces of our cultural past was installed in Gallery Stratford’s, Art in the Trees. Throughout 2021 to 2023 she worked with social-practice-artist Dawn Matheson on www.howtodrawatree.ca to visualize and interpret site specific sound walks exploring mental health and pathways to wellness within the forests of The Arboretum, Guelph ON. Her drone studies and writing about Guelph’s man-made lake were included in Another Earth’s 2023 photographic survey What Makes a Lake? Tracing Movement. Since 2020, Forsey has also worked on several short films with editor Ed Sinclair for The Arboretum in Guelph, Ontario.
Richelle’s work has been shown in Canada, the U.S. and abroad, as well as collaboratively in the Contact Photography Festival, and Nuit Blanche (Toronto).
She is a member of the urbex photography collective TLR Club and the Photography Technician for the College of Arts at the University of Guelph.