Growing up in Los Angeles and being surrounded by over the top advertising and the glitz of Hollywood instilled a love of illusion in Kimber Berry and a desire to explore the psychological experience of living in a society so bombarded with visual noise and simulated environments. Berry’s installations and paintings interlace, overlap and converge upon themselves in much the same manner of existing in multiple environments at once. She uses the fluidity of paint and the brush stroke as a narrative tool to recreate the psychological compression of stimuli found in our society...

Southern artist Maggie Hasbrouck creates provocative, playful, and imaginative images, most typically of children using photoencaustic as her medium. Each composition presents a scene that is suspended from the natural order of time, and evokes a dreamscape, a precise emotive moment occurring in the imagination. Hasbrouck's consistent depiction of children as the key players in these scenes furthers her desire to profoundly influence the viewer: "As every one of us has been a child - and every one of us has been shaped crucially by our childhood - the presence of children invariably inspires strong sensations, irresistible associations. Hasbrouck's underage cohort does not serve to 'put you in the picture' so much as to put the picture in you, to narrow (if not collapse) the emotional distance between you and the moment you see," states Peter Frank, curator at the Riverside Art Museum in Los Angeles and freelance art critic.

As an artist, Joseph Rossano strives to distil ideas, concepts, and reality into their bare essence. His resulting minimalist sculptures aim to convey an emotion, ask a question, or direct the viewer on a path of introspection and investigation, as they explore man's impact on the environment. Rossano’s series "BOLD" is named for the acronym for the Barcode of Life Data Systems (BOLD) database. The subjects of these sculptures are a jewelled representation of reality that draw the viewer in for a closer inspection. As the viewer shortens the distance between himself and the sculpture, the specimen becomes increasingly difficult to discern. The viewer, now confronted with the frustration of being unable to make out exactly what is in the box, discovers the clear and legible text surrounding the specimen. The Ontario Genomics Institute has partnered with renowned Seattle-based artist, Joseph Rossano, and biologists Dr. Paul Hebert, Dr. Chris Meyer, Dr. Hannah Stewart, and Seabird McKeon to engage the public around the science of DNA barcoding and how it is being used to catalog the world’s vast – and threatened – biodiversity. Among the many applications of DNA barcoding is its use as an important tool in modern conservation biology. Indeed, conservation is at the very core of this work, which provides viewers with the opportunity to reflect on the impact of humankind on our environment.

The soft, sensuous abstraction of Steven Seinberg celebrates the process of insemination and honors the concept of fertility. Like the seeping of water into layers of planted soil, the thin washes of color in Seinberg's canvases penetrate imagery of seeds and pods, thereby realizing the creative potential inherent in this process. “Seinberg's art communicates in a mysterious, unobtrusive manner, speaking subtly and instinctively. Because the various elements within his pictures are determined by what he intuits at each moment of the process of creation, every aspect and phase of his work fades in and out of the paint almost imperceptibly,” says one critic.