Skip to content Skip to main navigation

2025 Shelley Peterson Student Art Exhibition

An annual exhibition celebrating the diverse artistic excellence of undergraduate students enrolled in visual studies programs across the University of Toronto’s three campuses.

Guest curated by Kate Whiteway

Works by

Maria Abu Askar, Petra Biddle-Gottesman, Shelly Chen, Abdal-Rahman Mohammed, Alice Zixuan Niu, Aubrey Emelia Pratama, Chubi Shaibu, Kodi Ume-Onydio, Molly Wang, Leo Dong Yiliang

Award Winners

Leo Dong Yiliang, Alice Niu, Abdal-Rahman Mohammed

The University of Toronto Shelley Peterson Student Art Exhibition is an annual exhibition celebrating the diverse artistic excellence of undergraduate students enrolled in visual studies programs from across the University of Toronto’s three campuses.

As an alumna of the Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies program, I am happy to guest curate this year’s exhibition. This iteration of the exhibition is the fifth to take place virtually and is composed of a selection of 11 works from 221 submissions across the three University of Toronto campuses. 

I am grateful for the support of Art Museum staff, in particular Barbara Fischer, Noa Bronstein, and Marianne Rellin. I would also like to acknowledge our wonderful juror Kate Wong, copyeditor Hana Nikčević, and professors Gareth Long, John Armstrong, Alexander Irving, and Sanaz Mazinani. I sincerely congratulate all the students and hope you enjoy the exhibition.

— Kate Whiteway, 2025 Shelley Peterson Student Art Exhibition guest curator

The Artworks

Leo Dong Yiliang, Summer Hawaii, 2024. Video, 10:29mins. Courtesy of the artist.

Award Winner

Leo Dong Yiliang
Summer Hawaii

2024
video, 10:29 mins

Download Summer Hawaii project description (PDF).

Campus: Scarborough
Fourth Year, Studio Art

Leo Dong Yiliang’s Summer Hawaii explores the contemporary landscape of information as seen through the various aesthetics, rhythms, and worldviews of conspiracy theories.

Viewers are encouraged to scrub the video, mirroring contemporary viewing habits and how digital platforms shape attention and engagement. Expressing anxiety for his younger sister’s generation (Gen Z), Yiliang writes, “At first, the internet was seen as a tool to democratize information. It seemed to hold the potential for inclusive participation. The internet has now become a profit-driven machine where communication itself is commodified.” Yiliang produced DVDs of Summer Hawaii and planted them in video stores, secondhand shops, libraries, and IKEA showrooms around Toronto, allowing the fictional work to merge with the real context of its surroundings.  

Kodi Ume-Onydio, Leased Surveillance, 2024. Digital collage, plywood, plexiglas, spray paint, photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
Kodi Ume-Onydio, Leased Surveillance, 2024. Digital collage, plywood, plexiglas, spray paint, photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

Kodi Ume-Onydio
Leased Surveillance

2024
digital collage, plywood, Plexiglas, spray paint, photograph

Campus: St. George
Fourth Year, Architectural Studies; Visual Studies

Kodi Ume-Onydio created Leased Surveillance by measuring the dimensions of his apartment’s living room, recreating it as a to-scale miniature model, and photographing the model. 

As opposed to taking a black-and-white photo or desaturating the photo digitally, Ume-Onydio spray-painted the elements of his model black or white. The resulting image portrays a shadow-clad, film noir-esque representation of the city. Using a familiar domestic space as the referent for a photographed model produces an outcome both strange and alienating. Upon first glance, the scene outside the apartment window looks like the congregation of high rises one expects to see in downtown Toronto, but what we actually see is an image of the archetypal panopticon prison – Ume-Onydio’s critique of “Toronto’s extreme housing crisis.” He explains, “By crafting a small model of my living room and meticulously photographing it, I create a striking dystopian scene that draws inspiration from the architecture and social anxieties of panopticons. By means of digital collaging, I alter a photo of my apartment model, recontextualizing it into one of the many housing units in an urban scale panopticon. The piece opens discussions regarding landlords as “wardens” and tenants as “prisoners” in a suffocating housing market that restricts economic growth, loveable everyday conditions, and stable mental health.” 

Molly Wang, Open the microwave to heat, 2024. Photograph, 29.5″ x 24″. Image courtesy of the artist.

Molly Wang
Open the microwave to heat

2024
photograph, 29.5″ x 24″

Campus: Scarborough
Fourth Year, Studio Art

Molly Wang similarly uses strategies of to-scale modelling and photography in her work Open the microwave to heat.

Wang removed the interior elements of a broken microwave and replaced them with a hand-crafted set of objects that evokes a traditional Japanese tearoom. Using wood, clay, paper, paint, and fabric, she constructed a miniature scene of ritual and repose, further customizing it by changing the built-in lighting. Noting that the microwave is associated with instant gratification, Wang thinks of this work as a framework for mindfulness, slowness, and appreciation for the deliberate rhythms of the tea ceremony, saying: “In this reimagined setting, the tearoom becomes a form of resistance, challenging the pervasive commodification of time in capitalist structures.”  

Petra Biddle-Gottesman, What if we kissed at…, 2024. Pen ink on paper, 22.5″ x 30″. Image courtesy of the artist.

Petra Biddle-Gottesman
What if we kissed at…

2024
pen ink on paper, 22.5″ x 30″

Campus: St. George
Second Year, Immunology; Diaspora and Transnational Studies; Visual Studies

Petra Biddle-Gottesman also creates a simulated or imagined version of real, physical space.

Her drawing What if we kissed at … explores explores how spaces and places are reworked by memory. Using Google Maps Street View, Biddle-Gottesman located rooms and buildings that hold personal significance and assessed their various angles, seeking to determine which views best aligned with her fantasized memories of those spaces. Biddle-Gottesman drew a series of imagined versions of these spaces warped and joined together through memory and fantasy, paying specific attention to rendering texture. The drawing’s aerial perspective and bizarre network of rooms evoke a dream-like experience of physical space. The title of the work references the 2018 meme invoking romantic fantasy in relation to peculiar architectural locations.  

Shelly Chen, The Positivity Factory, 2024. Video, 01:35mins. Courtesy of the artist.

Shelly Chen
The Positivity Factory

2024
video, 01:35 mins

Campus: Scarborough
Fourth Year, Studio Art; Media and Communication Studies

Shelly Chen’s The Positivity Factory segregates employees from one another and assigns them the jobs that best suit their skills and mood.

The manager monitors everyone on a security network that tracks each employee’s “Emotion Dashboard” and removes any negative disposition towards work. What work these employees actually do is not disclosed. Chen’s unsettling, animated video was created on Blender and is narrated by the now ubiquitous TikTok text-to-speech tool, which purports to improve accessibility and create consistency of content. We are all for positivity here! How does that feel? Come and build the Positivity Factory! 

Aubrey Emelia Pratana, Halu Mart, 2025. Digital design, website, sculpture. Image courtesy of the artist.

Aubrey Emelia Pratama
Halu Mart

2025
digital design, website, sculpture

Campus: Mississauga
Fourth Year, Art & Art History; Communication, Culture, Information & Technology

Aubrey Emelia Pratama continues the theme of fabulation in her imaginary online grocery store.

At Halu Mart, each product is based on a sense of diasporic longing. Jakarta Haze Filter Cigarette Pack, for instance, speaks to the consumer who misses the smell of home and its 145 Air Quality Index. Mimicking the familiar design and language of app-based e-commerce, a key factor in the rise of gig economies, Halu Mart is inspired by Indonesia’s kaki lima (street vendors). The title, Halu, comes from an Indonesian slang term for “delusional.” Pratama adds: “The imaginary grocery store comedically plays on the idea of not finding connections with Canadian culture as an Indonesian, therefore finding most comfort in Asian grocery stores. These products are individually designed and branded as fake products that I wish were real and could be purchased.” 

Alice Niu, A Sudden Stop, 2024. Acrylic and oil pastel, 30” x 24”. Image courtesy of the artist.
Alice Niu, A Sudden Stop (detail), 2024.
Alice Niu, A Sudden Stop (detail), 2024.
Alice Niu, Mama, 2024. Acrylic and oil pastel, 30” x 30”. Image courtesy of the artist.
Alice Niu, Mama (detail), 2024.
Alice Niu, Mama (detail), 2024.

Award Winner

Alice Niu
A Sudden Stop

2024
acrylic and oil pastel, 30″ x 24″


Alice Niu
Mama

2024
acrylic and oil pastel, 30″ x 30″

Campus: St. George
Fourth Year, Architectural Studies; Visual Studies

Alice Niu’s arresting paintings suspend fleeting moments of intensity where light and movement push up against the edges of the night.

In A Sudden Stop, a group of cows careen on the highway in the beam of a rapidly approaching car. This unexpected encounter has occurred many times in Niu’s life while taking long drives with her parents through the northern grassland nomadic area of China. The painting captures the tension, fear, and excitement Niu felt upon lurching to a stop in the darkness and the large, lumbering cow bodies straining to get out of the way of the car’s swerving headlights. Mama similarly renders light in the darkness to evoke a moment of suspension. In Niu’s words, this painting looks at “the complex boundaries in the parent-child relationship in many East Asian families. At the center is a woman, symbolizing the mother, pointing into the distance and shouting, her presence both commanding and distant.” Standing in front of a locked iron gate, the mother figure is framed by the red glow of taillights and illuminated by the white light of headlights. The headlights are also reflected in the sheen of rainwater on the ground, a sign, like the vibrant purple sky, of a passing storm. To further evoke the sense of tension in the painting, Niu applied clay at the base of the canvas and blended paint with quartz sand and oil pastel. 

Abdal-Rahman Mohammed, Sacrum Mnemonic, 2024. Charcoal, 48” x 96”. Image courtesy of the artist.
Abdal-Rahman Mohammed, Sacrum Mnemonic (detail), 2024.
Abdal-Rahman Mohammed, Sacrum Mnemonic (detail), 2024.
Abdal-Rahman Mohammed, Sacrum Mnemonic (detail), 2024.

Award Winner

Abdal-Rahman Mohammed
Sacrum Mnemonic

2024
charcoal, 48″ x 96″

Campus: Mississauga
Third Year, Art & Art History

Abdal-Rahman Mohammed’s work, Sacrum Mnemonic, derives its impact from its scale.

At eight feet wide, the charcoal drawing is larger than the human body. The work demonstrates clarity and precision in its shading, the inky darkness of the background providing contrast for the brilliant ridges where less pigment is applied. Indecipherable forms populate the composition – in the top left, something reminiscent of an ear; in the top right, grotesques in profile, mouths agape. At the centre of the work a wall of billowing fog seems to clash with a trumpeting vortex. At left, a canal releases a small, moon-like orb casting its brilliant glow. In its composition, treatment of line, and monochromatism, this work calls to my mind William Blake’s engraving The Whirlwind of Lovers (1827). 

Maria Abu Askar, 403 Days, 2024. Printed book. Image courtesy of the artist.
Maria Abu Askar, 403 Days, 2024. Printed book. Image courtesy of the artist.
Maria Abu Askar, 403 Days, 2024. Printed book. Image courtesy of the artist.
Maria Abu Askar, 403 Days, 2024. Printed book. Image courtesy of the artist.
Maria Abu Askar, 403 Days, 2024. Printed book. Image courtesy of the artist.
Maria Abu Askar, 403 Days, 2024. Printed book. Image courtesy of the artist.
Maria Abu Askar, 403 Days, 2024. Printed book. Image courtesy of the artist.
Maria Abu Askar, 403 Days, 2024. Printed book. Image courtesy of the artist.
Maria Abu Askar, 403 Days, 2024. Printed book. Image courtesy of the artist.
Maria Abu Askar, 403 Days, 2024. Printed book. Image courtesy of the artist.
Maria Abu Askar, 403 Days, 2024. Printed book. Image courtesy of the artist.
Maria Abu Askar, 403 Days, 2024. Printed book. Image courtesy of the artist.
Maria Abu Askar, 403 Days, 2024. Printed book. Image courtesy of the artist.
Maria Abu Askar, 403 Days, 2024. Printed book. Image courtesy of the artist.

Maria Abu Askar
403 Days

2024
printed book

Campus: Mississauga
Second Year, Art & Art History

Maria Abu Askar has, like Aubrey Pratama and Leo Dong Yiliang, created a meta-narrative as the basis of her work.

403 Days takes the form of a child’s journal recording his life in Gaza for one year before he is killed in an airstrike, found later by a journalist under the rubble. This work is based on journalist Saleh Al-Jafarawi’s similar account, of finding a fully intact, hand-made book by a young boy. Abu Askar’s writing and drawings are fictional, but they are based on the ongoing events in Gaza and, in particular, on images, videos, and testimonies shared on Instagram. The pages of Abu Askar’s work are copies of pamphlets dropped on Gazan civilians, warning them to evacuate.  

Chubi Shaibu, Robot I, 2024. Kinetic sculpture. Courtesy of the artist.

Chubi Shaibu
Robot I

2024
kinetic sculpture

Campus: Scarborough
Fourth Year, Studio Art

Chubi Shaibu’s kinetic sculpture Robot I represents a high heel in motion.

The repetition and rhythm of the movement simulates someone walking. Shaibu locates her interest in art and robotics in an exploration of gender: “This work reflects on the automation of gender expression using clothing as a means of communication. Heels have a feminine connotation to them and this piece questions who is encouraged and who is shamed for wearing them. As a young Nigerian woman, I’ve always been interested in intersectional femininity and who has permission to express more feminine attributes.” Shaibu learned woodcutting, metal threading, lathing, and coding to create this work. The decision to leave the Arduino board visible was made to “demystify femininity,” but also to highlight the artifice and limitations of the piece itself. Providing access to the code and blatantly showing how the heel moves, the work takes on a humble and playful tone.   

Juror’s Remarks

This year, the three award winners of the Shelley Peterson Student Art Exhibition share a dedication to craft and a fluency in their chosen mediums: charcoal on paper, acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, and video and interventionist art. Their works, while different, all exhibit a thoughtful relationship between concept and materiality and effectively convey ideas and critical positions.

Alice Niu’s figures exist at the uncanny boundary between contemporary urban and rural life. Niu creates moments frozen in time and charged with emotional and psychological resonance through deft layering and subtle modulations of light and colour. Leo Dong Yiliang’s Summer Hawaii is a work of media archaeology that parses religion, language, music subcultures, and artificial intelligence to subvert the circulation of information, belief systems, and notions of truth in the media age. It is difficult to resist reading an allegory of current times into Abdal-Rahman Mohammed’s large-format work on paper. The composition—merging digitally influenced forms with organic, wave-like shapes—is imbued with movement and a kind of sweeping, apocalyptic intensity.

Art provides a way of understanding the present zeitgeist. The work of this year’s award winners allows the past to dovetail with the present, questioning their binary relationship. These practices suggest that the intensity of the world we share may be better channeled if we hone our ability to interpret and sit with its complexities. Dark times require us to dig deeper, and so deeper we will go. 

Congratulations to this year’s winners, the artists in the exhibition, and all who submitted work. It was a pleasure to review your contributions.

—Kate Wong, Independent Curator & Writer

Remarks from Barbara Fischer

The annual Shelley Peterson Student Art Exhibition celebrates the creativity and artistic excellence of undergraduate students in the Visual Arts programs at the University of Toronto’s St. George campus, UTSC, and the Art & Art History program jointly offered by UTM and Sheridan College. 

The Art Museum congratulates the 2025 award winners Leo Dong Yiliang, Alice Niu, and Abdal-Rahman Mohammed, as well as all of the artists selected this year for their illuminating visual insights into contemporary concerns. The three awards were adjudicated by Kate Wong, independent curator. Curated by University of Toronto alumna Kate Whiteway, this digital exhibition was produced in collaboration with faculty members Gareth Long, Alexander Irving, and John Armstrong.

We gratefully acknowledge the continued support of the Honourable David Peterson, former Chancellor of the University of Toronto, and his wife, the actress and writer Shelley Peterson, for whom the award is named. For their support of the exhibition and digital publication, we also thank the Office of the Vice-President & Provost. 

— Barbara Fischer, Executive Director/Chief Curator, Art Museum at the University of Toronto