Mandy Espezel

Mandy Espezel is an artist originally from the community of Fort McMurray: an urban service area within the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, situated deep within the boreal forest of Northern Alberta, Treaty 8 territory, on the traditional lands of the Cree and Dene peoples, as well as the unceded territory of the Métis Nation. Mandy attended the University of Alberta for their BFA, earned an MFA from the University of Lethbridge in 2012, and continues to teach studio art courses in the Art Department at the UofL. They have participated in numerous exhibitions and residencies across Canada and internationally and have received generous support from both the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts, including being chosen for the AFA’s 2023 ISCP Residency in New York Award. Their work is included in several private collections and in the permanent collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, which is currently featured in the group exhibition New Views at AFA’s Art House Gallery. In the summer of 2025, Mandy was Artist in Residence at Kunstnarhuset Messen in Ålvik, Norway, where elements of Almost Unimaginable, their most recent solo exhibition currently on view at the Trianon Gallery, were developed. Mandy is based in, and grateful to have made a home in, the community of Sikóóhkotok/Lethbridge, Treaty 7, in the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy.

Research

I explore visceral and haptic manifestations of anxiety, desire, humour and failure through an intuitive-material practice. My interdisciplinary practice is rooted in the expanded field of painting: a process of porous absorption, experimentation, reflection, and embodiment. Concerned with the historical-painterly binary construction of the figurative and the abstract, individual paintings are not planned: the intuitive is balanced with visual form and semiotic consideration, within series context. I am interested in how painting can question where we define the edge of the body, and where the material of the object is both present as itself and simultaneously pointing at (multiple) signified potential meanings. In my work, I endeavour to manifest a complex simultaneity and prioritize a material empathy.