Emma Ducharme

An emerging artist based in Tkarón:to/Toronto, Emma Ducharme’s work is an investigation into the absurd. Her practice reflects on the curiosity of balance; the inexplicable and inescapable duality of humankind.

Holding a Bachelor of Fine Arts from OCAD U (2021), Ducharme is the recipient of a Juror’s Choice Award from the Latcham Art Centre’s Annual Juried Exhibition (2023). She has most recently shown her work in the Untapped section at the Artist Project.

Working from intuitive graphite sketches to generate impractical dimensional wall sculptures, her process heavy work invites a questioning into a societal obsession with a maximized exploitation of human labor, and its driving notions of infinite growth/progress.

Considering inter-connectedness, her current work deals primarily with questions on the rampant exploitation of human labour, its resulting environmental neglect, and issues of gender (mis)representation/(in)equality. The work implores a future visioning, imagining how current issues might be challenged differently if those who have been historically excluded from decision making positions were to regain the control of their own influence. They remind us that what we see, is not necessarily always what it seems.

Her practice calls into question our conscious and subconscious relationships with items; it considers the blindness of Ego as the basis for our faulty relationships with ourselves, and our surroundings, while challenging in this same vein our corporate commodified relationship to objects. Comfort and security (financial or otherwise) are the favoured yardsticks by which we measure success. But how can we truly quantify our own successes, asides from these corporatized monetary illusions so few of us ever experience?

Ducharme’s works invite us to reflect critically on our growing distracted consumption. They are a cry to stress the ever-expanding cruciality of introspection as a radical act against the nefarious and insidious nature of capitalist colonial forces. Forces that value endless productivity at any cost over collective actualization.