Aftertaste, Poiēsis Collective

Aftertaste features photographic works by emerging artist group, Poiēsis Collective, centered on the consumption and absorption of images as they manifest through tourism, advertising, and the remnants of photographic production. The exhibition positions image consumption as an active force, exposing how visual culture shapes perception and societal values while producing both symbolic and material residue.

Cover Artwork: Jaiden George, The World’s Most Photographed Barn

About the Collective

Poiẽsis is an arts collective comprised of lens-based artists working and living on the unceded traditional territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations (so called Vancouver).

The term Poiēsis is from the ancient Greek word ποιεῖν (poiein), which means to make or to bring into being. Aristotle adopted the term in his Poetics, a response to Plato’s theory of mimesis in art, as introduced in The Republic. Central to our thinking as a collective, Heidegger defined the term as the “poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery” of that which previously did not exist.

Poiēsis Collective is a group of artists (Andream, David Aquino, Vanessa Denham, Jaiden George, Khim Mata Hipol, Paniz Mani and Charlie Mahoney Volk) that come from widely varying backgrounds but which are united in their commitment to approach photography in a critical yet generative manner, as well as common thematic interests in self-reflectivity, staging, economies of image production and exchange, the creation and maintenance of place and self through images, the construction and deconstruction of images (self)portraiture, and critical perspectives on race and gender.

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About the Artists

Andream - b.1985, Grande Prairie, AB, Canada; lives and works in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Andream (she/her) has spent her adult life in helping roles in public health care as an occupational therapist (OT). In 2019, Andream began a journey of slowing down and began a therapeutic process of creating art for herself. Burnout, anxiety, and depression are all things that she continues to work out/in/with/on. Her art journey has involved looking inwards, expressing feelings through photography and mixed media, investigating relationships, community, environmental, and social issues. She dreams of continuing her therapeutic art and photography practice as a way to open spaces for voices that are too often unheard.

Andream holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Arts + Design (2024) and a Bachelor of Science in Occupational Therapy from the University of Alberta (2007). Andream was the recipient of the John C. Kerr Chancellor Emeritus Award for Excellence in Visual Arts (Vancouver 2024) and the Saralee James Memorial Award (Vancouver, 2024). Her work has been exhibited at Penticton Art Gallery: Gifts of Madness (Penticton, 2024), Capture Festival x ECU (Vancouver 2024), Hexennacht Festival (Victoria 2023), Lamplight Music and Art Festival (Vancouver Island 2023), Responding to Climate Through Art and Design, ECU Library Exhibition (Vancouver 2023). She curated Photography, an exhibition at ECU featuring unconventional photo-based artworks by 7 students from various majors (Vancouver, January 2024). Andream’s work has been included in publications such as Woo Publication (2021 & 2022), and online publication Forget-Me-Not-Press (2022 & 2023).

Andream is a 3rd generation european settler who lives on the unceeded lands of the šxʷməθkʷəy̓ əmaɁɬ təməxʷ(Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh-ulh Temíx̱w (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ təməxʷ(Tsleil-Waututh) Nations (so-called “Vancouver”).

Charlie Mahoney-Volk - b.2002, Winnipeg, MB, Canada; lives and works in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Charlie Mahoney-Volk is an emerging queer artist of settler descent from Treaty 1 Territory, so-called “Winnipeg, Manitoba”, and is currently based on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, so-called “Vancouver, British Columbia”. Mahoney-Volk’s practice is centred in lens-based work and publication design, and considers historical ties to westernized masculine archetypes in relation to queer gender identity, frequently using humour to explore themes of body and isolation.

Charlie Mahoney-Volk holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University (2024). They served as Editor-in-Chief of WOO Publication for Tender (Fall 2024) and Burnt (Spring 2025).

Mahoney-Volk’s lens-based work has been exhibited in ECUAD x Capture Photography Festival: Looking After: Photography as an Act of Care (Vancouver, 2023), Longing to See (Vancouver,2024), Current: Photography as Pause at Gallery 881 (Vancouver, 2024), and The Failed Life of a Cowboy at Zebra Club (Vancouver, 2025).

David Aquino - b.2001, Vancouver, BC, Canada; lives and works Vancouver, BC, Canada.

David Aquino is a photographer based in Vancouver, BC on the unceded and traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Coast Salish peoples. His work investigates the complications of self privacy and longing for home. He’s interested in how these themes coexist and obstruct the feeling of belonging.

David Aquino holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2023). He was awarded the Top Photo Student Scholarship from Artona in 2019. His work has been exhibited in various exhibitions, including Home (ECUAD, Vancouver, 2022), Iba’t Ibang Anyo, Iisang Kulay (Vancouver, 2022), Why Photography? (Vancouver, 2023), and ECUAD X Capture Photography Festival, featuring Stranger Than Fiction (2022) and Looking After: Photography as an Act of Care (2023). His work has also been showcased in Inscapes: Our Landscape Within (Italian Cultural Centre, Vancouver, 2023) and Let’s Follow the Sun at Mala Stanice National Gallery (Macedonia, 2023).

His photography has been published in Rituals (Broad Magazine, 2023), Homesick, Bittersweet (2023), Illuminating the Beauty of Science (Suboart Magazine, 2023), and Paradise (Woo Publication, 2023).

Jaiden George - b.1999, Tofino, BC, Canada; lives and works Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Jaiden George is an artist and scholar from the ʕaḥuusʔatḥ Nation, working and living in Vancouver, on the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples. He holds a BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2022), and is currently a graduate student in the department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia, where he is researching expressions of time in photography on the Northwest Coast.

George’s work explores how the world is both constructed and mediated through systems of signification – including but not limited to photography – and with particular emphasis on the reification of nature and the drafting of its image in imperial, settler/colonial, and commodified contexts. Recent projects have extended this line of inquiry in challenging the discursive frameworks of anthropology and art history on the Northwest Coast, figuring chiefly treasures and their inscribed rights a inseparable from the people who rightfully own them.

Khim Mata Hipol - b. 1999, Bauang, La Union, the Philippines; lives and works in North Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Filipino-born Khim Mata Hipol is an emerging interdisciplinary artist based on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam Nations. Through photography, Hipol examines how a sense of identity can be manipulated through commercialization. He explores the intersections of tourism, souvenir objects, and official government symbols, demonstrating how countries establish identity through these representations. Through portraiture, he illustrates how individuals use these objects to express patriotism and nationalism while simultaneously questioning their meanings and invoking ideas of colonialism and the “foreign”.

Hipol graduated with a Certificate of Photography (2019) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts Major in Photography with a Minor in Art and Text from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (Vancouver,2023). Hipol was awarded the Individual Arts Award from British Columbia Arts Council (2025), Audain Travel Award (2022), Chick Rice Award for Excellence in Photography (2023), Fund for the Arts on the North Shore (2024), an honorable mention for the Seymour Art Gallery New and Emerging Award (2022), and longlisted twice for the Lind Prize (2022/2023). His works have been featured in group shows at Trout Museum of Art (Wisconsin, 2025), FotomotoPH, (Philippines, 2025), Griffin Museum of Photography (Massachusetts 2024), Filter Photo (Chicago, 2024), Pendulum Gallery (Vancouver, 2024), Access Gallery (Vancouver, 2024), The Center of Fine Arts Photography (Colorado, 2022), Exposure Photography Festival (Calgary, 2022/2023), and Ciano Umuk Gallery (La Union, Philippines, 2023/2024). Hipol’s works have been acquired by Union Christian College (Philippines) and Ciano Umuk Gallery (Philippines), and can be found in private collections in Canada, USA, and Germany.

Paniz Mani - b. 2000, Isfahan/ Isfahan, Iran; lives and works in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Paniz Mani explores the intersection of Iranian culture, media, and gender studies within the context of Western capitalism, globalization, and patriarchy. Through the study of various visual media, including photography, magazines, and film, she examines how these forces shape and influence societal narratives. Recognizing the profound role of media in shaping our world, Paniz investigates where Western media collide with Iranian media, and examines their impact on contemporary Iranian culture, as well as their role in forming both personal and collective identities. As an emerging artist and researcher, Paniz has developed a practice working with photography and media art, focusing on archival and multimedia work, especially working with family archives and found footage. For Paniz, the discipline of photography is not about creating more images but studying them as an exciting archive of our collective memory, an inventory of what is perceived to be the truth. As a photographer, she is curious to explore how ideologies circulate through images: through what is highlighted and what is ignored. As Susan Sontag says: “A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer; picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights to interfere with, to invade ,or to ignore whatever is going on.”

Mani holds a Certificate in Graphic Design (2019) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2024). She is currently a graduate student at the Simon Fraser University School for the Contemporary Arts, where she holds an Entrance Scholarship (2025). Paniz has also received the SFU Travel & Research Award (2026) and a summer Graduate Fellowship Award (2026). Her work has been exhibited in Aftertaste at Pendulum Gallery (Vancouver, 2026) as part of the Capture Photography Festival; Longing to See: Photography and In-Visibility, ECUAD x Capture Photography Festival (Vancouver, 2024); New and Emerging at Seymour Art Gallery (North Vancouver, 2024); CURRENT - Photography as Pause at Gallery 881 (Vancouver, 2024); Transient Rhythms at Hargrove Gallery (Vancouver, 2024); Member and Sale at Access Gallery (Vancouver, 2024); and Why Photography? at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (Vancouver,2022). Her work has also been featured in Burnt, WOO Publication (Spring 2024).

Vanessa Denham - b. 1999, Vancouver, BC, Canada; lives and works in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Vanessa Denham (b. 1999) is a visual artist born and raised on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. Her practice explores the subjectivity of truth, identity, memory, technology, and relationships. Vanessa holds a Bachelor of Photography from Emily Carr University and is pursuing a Media Studies degree at UBC. Her work has been exhibited in The Show (Michael O’Brien Exhibition Commons, 2022), Focussed Blur (Zebra Club, 2024), Aftertaste (Pendulum Gallery, 2026).

Laura Ayres - b.2000, Langley, BC, Canada; lives and works in Langley, BC, Canada.

Laura Ayres is a photo-based artist from Langley, British Columbia. Her work explores the lasting power of images as both a physical object and as a distant representation of memory. Working with original photography, family archives, and found photographs, she reflects on themes of memory, loss, and the passage of time. Her practice investigates how personal and shared histories connect to the spaces we inhabit, and how a photograph’s meaning can change over time.

Laura holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University + Design. Her work has been shown in various exhibitions in Vancouver including, Aftertaste at the Pendulum Gallery (2026), New & Emerging at the Seymour Art Gallery (2025), Ghost Images at ECUAD x Capture Photography Festival’s (2025), CURRENT: Photography as Pause at Gallery 881 (2024) in Vancouver and as a part of the Noorderlicht Photography Festival (2023) in the Netherlands. Her work has also been published in various online and in-print magazines including PhotoEd Magazine, Lenscratch, and Woo Publication.

Sophie Brindle - b.1997, Victoria, BC, Canada; lives and works in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Sophie-Jane Brindle (She/Her) is a Vancouver-based artist working primarily with photography. Her practice examines the relationship between technology, visual culture, and consumption, with a focus on how digital environments shape perception, identity, and contemporary experience. Working through photographic image-making, she considers how images circulate across online and physical contexts and accumulate meaning through repetition and distribution.

Brindle received her BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2025, following studies at Concordia University in Montreal and the University of Victoria. Her work has been exhibited in Vancouver and Montreal, including Aftertaste with Capture Photography Festival and Port Moody Arts Centre (2026), Ghost Images: Photography and Trace (Capture Photography Festival 2025), Terms and Conditions (2025), Global 50/50: This Is Gender (2025), and Residue at Gallery POPOP in Montreal (2020). Her work has also been featured in the Capture Photography Festival Catalogue (2025/26), and she was shortlisted for the Saralee James Memorial Award for Political and Social Activism in the Arts in 2025.

Alongside her artistic practice, Brindle engages with independent publishing and contemporary print culture through curatorial and bookselling initiatives in Vancouver.