A Collective Beginning: The Painting Club Members Exhibition

There’s a particular energy to a first exhibition—something provisional, but insistent. The Painting Club: Members Exhibition carries that charge. Installed across the Student Gallery in a loose salon-style arrangement, the show brings together 21 artists in a shared visual field, where scale, subject, and sensibility shift rapidly from work to work. There’s no singular thesis—just a collective presence, and painting as something actively being claimed.

The University of Manitoba Painting Club was founded in Fall 2025 by undergraduate students Myeisha Laniog, Patricia Sanque, Anna Sawchuk, and River Inan in response to a gap. Painting is central to the School of Art’s curriculum, but the club creates space for what happens outside of it: informal critique, material experimentation, and the kind of peer exchange that shapes a practice as much as any course. The exhibition extends that ethos into the gallery, reflecting the group’s desire to build a more connected and self-directed painting community.

The installation follows the room. Works move around the perimeter in a loose sequence—larger canvases anchoring the walls, smaller pieces filling the gaps between them. A painting of white flowers and a pale green moth asks for a different kind of attention than a tightly cropped portrait or a surreal narrative scene. Some works are pinned directly to the wall. The effect is cumulative—looking moves around the space and across approaches, less about resolution than rhythm.

The show doesn’t organize around a theme. Instead, it reflects the conditions that produced it: proximity, conversation, and the desire to be seen. Painting here isn’t presented as a fixed category so much as a set of ongoing questions about image-making, representation, and what it means to work alongside others. Showing work in this context becomes part of that inquiry—an experience shaped as much by dialogue and contrast as by individual intention.

For many of the artists, this is an early moment of public presentation, one that sits alongside institutional structures without being fully absorbed by them. The Painting Club operates as both supplement and proposition—building continuity between studio practice and exhibition-making, between individual work and collective visibility. It also points forward, imagining a sustained space for future students to share work, test ideas, and support one another beyond the classroom.

The exhibition offers a snapshot of a group of artists working in parallel, connected by a shared commitment to painting and to each other. It marks both an arrival and an opening