Emerging Artists from the Teegatha’Oh Zheh Studio

Feb 20

Emerging Artists from the Teegatha’Oh Zheh Studio

EDGE GALLERY
March 7 - 29, 2025
Opening Reception: March 7, 5-7pm

Co-written by Colin Dorward and Phoebe Gonzales Rohrbacher

Since the mid-twentieth century, we have seen various artistic movements pursue “authentic” ideals by championing forms of expression that appear untouched by the academy. Art Brut, Raw Art, Naive Art, Primitivism, and Outsider Art are all titles that have emerged to categorize artworks that convey a notion of existing despite traditional arts institutions. As these movements were folded into the narrative of Western art, they helped reshape our understanding of painting and informed the texture of Modernity.

Today, nearly a century since the introduction of outsider art into the Western canon, social change and expanded definitions of art have led to a more democratized valuation of artistic expression. “Inside” and “outside” have blurred to the degree that they are no longer distinguishable.

Regardless of their level of understanding of the larger historical or current art context that they belong to, artists with IDD are highly capable of innovation within contemporary art conversations. Even individuals who communicate in unfamiliar ways (e.g. non-verbal artists), convey thoughts, feelings, ideas, emotions and experiences through their art in fresh and complex ways.

In the parallel exhibitions at Arts Underground and The Warehouse, we see a diverse range of work from the artists at Teegatha’Oh Zheh Progressive Art Studio, where Whitehorse artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities are supported to develop their own unique art practice and build professional, cohesive bodies of work. This is not art therapy, lessons or craft time. Rather, it is a serious exploration of art-making by artists.

The Arts Underground exhibition features work by sixteen emerging artists. The show highlights the developing individual artistic visions of each artist.

At the Warehouse exhibitions, seven artists with and without relationships to formal art institutions are exhibited (established TOZ Studio artists and peers); not as a means of comparison, but to emphasize a shared artistic language that spans cultural and socioeconomic divides.

In another context, the artists with IDD presented in both exhibitions might be positioned within the lineage of Outsider Art, a label historically applied to self-taught artists working away from conventional art institutions. While these IDD artists may work outside formal training structures, their inclusion there, alongside neurotypical peers at both galleries underscores that their work does not require its own category or need to be understood as separate or peripheral from the broader story of art.

Rather than reinforcing an insider/outsider divide, these parallel exhibitions acknowledge that artistic validity is not determined by institutional access or one’s neurotype but by the force and clarity of their artistic vision.

In celebration of a shared artistic language, we resist the impulse to define artists by their neurocognitive differences and instead recognize their work on its own terms.

FEATURED ARTISTS
Taylor Amundson, Trevor Beamish, Fauve Berrel, Britt Cowper, Rachel Dawson, Alanna Dene, Travis Dick, Hayley Halushka, Macey Hangartner, Christian Kempis, Aimee Lien, Zachary Louie, Tijana McCarthy, Stefan Oettli, Anna Thompson, and Cheri Wilson