July 3 - July 25, 2026Re: Emergence
Identity, Visibility, and Emotion at the Intersection of Fashion and Design
Ria BaileyJoana Bauman-Enriquezstécy helena franckDaniele Ruddock
This exhibition brings together the work of Ria Bailey, Joana Bauman-Enriquez, Stécy Helena Franck, and Daniele Ruddock, four recently graduated students from The Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Fashion. Focusing on notions of identity, in/visibility, gender and sexuality, and emotional release, this exhibition gathers garments, books, and multi-media works originally displayed as part of the School of Fashion’s Mass Exodus graduating student showcase together, under the theme of Re:Emergence. The title and it’s style, refers to the restaging and reimagining of these projects at Artspace TMU (the literal re-emergence of these works in public), the manner in which each of the artist approaches their subject matter through lenses of becoming, coalescence, regeneration, and invitation, as well as the artists’ personal growth and professional development through their educational journey and at this early stage of their career (regarding –– “re:” –– emergence).
Re:Emergence is a collaboration between the School of Fashion, School of Image Arts, and Artspace TMU. Thus it also marks the emergence of new and renewed relationships between these departments and the gallery.
The Void
Ria Bailey
The Void focuses on the emptiness, emotional absence, and numbness a person experiences throughout their life. A personal tribute to the loneliness I have experienced growing up in a world full of people feeling stuck and unable to move forward. As humans, we experience periods of stagnation where we are neither happy nor sad, but right in the middle, feeling emotionless. This feeling can be tiring, draining, and isolating, as we do everything in our power to move forward, yet the void pulls us with no hope of escape. This project is expressed through deep blacks, muted grays, negative space in garments, embellishments, and textures that suggest fragility and the tension of being stuck in the void. My collection is a personal tribute to the loneliness and fragility I have experienced, and its fragments transform internal absence into external form, serving as gateways for vessels of silence and expression.
CATHARSIS
Joana Bauman-Enriquez
Catharsis is a project that encompasses music, photography, and three looks in jewelry and chainmail. The main medium of this project is chainmail, a material typically associated with the male, and other jewelry techniques. Chainmail is a material that conveys how religion can facilitate violence and shame, but also hope and a sense of protection. These looks take design cues from medieval dress and armour, while defying the Medieval Catholic ideas of what a woman is supposed to wear. The garments integrate the silhouettes and design elements of medieval wear with the assertive sensibilities of a suit of armour. This dichotomy of strength and delicacy is imperative to the premise of the looks, the writing and photography, and the music.
I Wasn’t There When You Saw Me !
stécy helena franck
I Wasn’t There When You Saw Me ! notes on perception, belonging and surveillance is an art coffee table style book that functions as an autoethnographic meditation of my experiences of migration and displacement in shaping identity. Through visual and textual reflections, the work examines how experiences of movement across borders and cultures complicate notions of home. I hope to use this as evidence on the importance of art to challenge controlling narratives and to imagine new ways of being seen.
The Beauty in Becoming
Daniele Ruddock
The Beauty in Becoming explores processes of change, growth, and acceptance, structured across three phases: Repression of Nature, The Journey We Take Back to Ourselves, and How We Become. It is an intimate, diaristic body of work comprised of three distinct booklets—each Coptic bound, printed on 70lb matte text paper—and enclosed in magnetic cotton muslin envelopes. Serving as both a personal archive and a site of reflection, the work engages with themes of perception and recognition. Queerness is often pathologized in opposition to the natural, thus each book considers how such external forces shape our understanding of self. At its core, the capstone asks: How does queer identity take shape through cycles of rest, return, and becoming?
—Beauty is not a fixed endpoint, but rather something that emerges through ongoing transformation.
About the Artists
Ria Bailey
Ria Bailey is a fibre artist and fashion communications creative. She focuses on the intersection of materials and individual storytelling, and on how they stitch together memories that knot together. Her practice stems from an interest in textiles and how they can weave together narratives that hold memories, structure, and history, revealing hidden messages we were unaware of. Her background in fashion communication shapes the way she builds visual narratives. Experimentation is essential to her practice. Handmade techniques and repetition help Ria to gain insight into her work. Such approaches, including crocheting, knotting, deconstruction, and analogue work, allow her to intervene in and manipulate materials, mimicking psychological landscapes. Every piece she creates is a living research that can also be an excavation. In the future, as a multidisciplinary artist, she aims to expand her work by collaborating with other creatives in fashion, creating installations, and producing editorial spreads.
Joana Bauman-Enriquez
Mercy (Joana Bauman) is a feminist artist based in Toronto whose work focuses on bodily autonomy, sexual violence, and the facilitation of misogyny through patriarchy and religion. Mercy embeds personal meanings into bold pieces that centre the refusal to fall into normative expectations as an artist and a woman. Her work is driven by a desire to express any and all emotion in a way that is cathartic for both creator and viewer. She defies the bounds of any one medium, blending jewelry, photography, music, sculpture, and painting into her body of work to create and expand the story.
stécy helena franck
Stécy is a Haitian-born, Montréal-raised, and Toronto-based artist whose practice is rooted in exploring identity through visual storytelling. Drawing from ethnographic studies and critical fabulation, she aims to examine how diasporic histories shape our understanding of the self. Rooted in cultural hybridity, her work embraces layered identities as a generative space to question where memory, experience and futurism intersect. Her goal is to expand on how diasporic narratives are represented and create new possibilities for reimagining who we were, who we are and who we might become in speculative landscapes.
Daniele Ruddock
Daniele Ruddock is a Jamaican-born graphic designer based in Toronto. With a background in Fashion Communications, she has cultivated specialized skills in print, digital media and photography. Daniele uses her expansive design knowledge to translate concepts into rich and layered visual works. She works with what she is given, and centers experimentation in all creative facets.
Daniele’s artistic philosophy embraces the use of colour, texture and shape to create works that exist in harmony. She is a versatile creative who is able to effectively adapt her visual voice to suit a variety of projects. In her personal life, she is an avid moviegoer and self-proclaimed cinephile. She shoots casually on both 35mm film & DSLR, and enjoys a quiet life— finding small beauty in the mundane everyday.
