ArtBeat

ArtBeat’s special series with Art With Heart, in support of Casey House, continues with Spencer Shevlen, one of the curatorial committee’s co-chairs, and committee member Craig D’Arville.Spencer has been attending Art With Heart with his family for years, often bidding alongside his mom. Part of what keeps bringing him back is the possibility of discovering an artist he has never encountered before and getting behind the work early. Over seven years on the committee, listening to how other people see has also expanded his own instincts as a collector.Craig arrives from another side of the art world. After decades of working directly with artists, he is acutely aware of how much visibility can matter, particularly for accomplished practices that exist outside traditional gallery representation. Art With Heart can put that work in front of collectors and dealers who may otherwise never come across it, sometimes before the final collection has even been decided.Those perspectives meet around a table where people are expected to make a case for what they believe in. A committee member can arrive convinced about one piece and leave persuaded by another. The collection has to work as a whole, appeal to the people who will eventually bid and, above all, raise meaningful support for Casey House.Spencer and Craig also challenge the idea that collecting requires expertise or a particular kind of life. Art With Heart offers a way to encounter established names alongside artists who may be entirely new to you. Their advice is refreshingly uncomplicated: pay attention to what excites you, buy what you love and let your eye develop from there.Art With Heart takes place October 19, 2026, at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. The silent auction opens October 13. Purchase your tickets here.

ArtBeat launches its special series with Art With Heart, in support of Casey House, with Toronto artist Phuong Nguyen.Early in her practice, Phuong felt a pressure to make work about where she came from. Being Vietnamese seemed to come with an expectation that identity should become subject matter, something she was reluctant to let define the work.Her work eventually found another route through chinoiserie. What interested Phuong was the distance between lived culture and the version of Asia imagined through European decorative traditions. From there, she began looking more closely at ornamentalism and at the ways Asian women have historically been defined through decoration itself.Historical sources often become part of the making process, leading her toward forms that can suggest both ornament and the body.For Art With Heart, Phuong returned to a motif found in a French colonial publication and translated it into a carved wooden form. Its shape begins to suggest a torso or ribcage, with a small ceramic heart placed inside.Phuong also speaks about her work as an art therapist and registered psychotherapist, and about the role stigma can play in preventing people from accessing care and support. Her connection to Casey House is tied closely to that understanding, as well as to something she has been reconsidering in her own life: love and care are not passive. They are things we practise through action, again and again.Art With Heart takes place October 19, 2026, at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. The silent auction opens October 13. Purchase your tickets here.Artist BioBorn and raised in Toronto, Phuong Nguyen is a visual artist working across oil painting and sculpture. Her practice explores ornamentalism, Orientalism, and the relationship between personhood and objecthood, drawing on the aesthetics and history of chinoiserie in relation to Southeast Asian and Vietnamese femininity.Nguyen holds a BFA from OCAD University (2014).Phuong is currently represented by Vin Gallery in Asia and Tian Contemporain in Quebec.

The next day, Kyle Scheurmann continues further north, moving through wildfire sites and clear cuts as the trip begins to come to a close.He reflects on what it’s like to come out of those environments and sit with what you’ve seen, and how that begins to affect the work.An encounter in a remote valley turns into an exchange, and the final stretch of the trip leads to standing at the edge of protected land while wildfire burns on either side. It’s a moment that’s difficult to reconcile, and one that continues to inform We Could Have Been A Mountain, on view at Bau-Xi Gallery in Vancouver until April 28.This is Part Two of a two-part release. Part One is available here.Kyle is the founder of Art Auction for Old Growth, an online charity auction supporting the protection of endangered old-growth forests in British Columbia. The initiative is in partnership with the Nature-Based Solutions Foundation, with the next edition returning in September 2026.An award-winning short film by filmmaker Lachlan Ross follows Kyle through at-risk old-growth regions as he documents environmental change in real time. The film is available via Bau-Xi Gallery’s YouTube channel.Follow ArtBeat on Instagram.

Kyle Scheurmann spent much of this past summer out in the field, moving through active logging sites and wildfire zones, witnessing firsthand the pace and scale of what’s unfolding across the landscape.In this conversation, he reflects on what it meant to be that close to it. What began as observation became something more immersive, where distance fell away and his understanding of the work, and his role within it, began to shift in real time.We talk through salvage logging, heli-logging, and the realities of being in environments that are constantly changing. These experiences carry into a new body of work, We Could Have Been A Mountain, opening Saturday, April 11 at Bau-Xi Gallery in Vancouver.This is Part One of a two-part release. Part Two will be out Tuesday, April 14.Kyle is the founder of Art Auction for Old Growth, an online charity auction supporting the protection of endangered old-growth forests in British Columbia. The initiative is in partnership with the Nature-Based Solutions Foundation, with the next edition returning in September 2026.An award-winning short film by filmmaker Lachlan Ross follows Kyle through at-risk old-growth regions as he documents environmental change in real time. The film is available via Bau-Xi Gallery’s YouTube channel.Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1988, Kyle Scheurmann completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto in 2013. In 2018, he completed his Master of Fine Arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, where he was named Valedictorian.Since 2019, Scheurmann has maintained studios in remote, wooded locations, documenting the incremental impact of climate change while contributing to conservation and activism efforts. In 2021, he was invited to participate in the Eden Grove AiR residency at the Fairy Creek blockades on unceded Pacheedaht territory. During his four-month stay, he worked as a resident artist, journalist, and legal witness, documenting the experiences of Forest Protectors working to safeguard some of the last remaining ancient forests in Canada.Follow ArtBeat on Instagram.

Russna Kaur grew up in her mother’s Indian bridal boutique in Brampton, Ontario - surrounded by glittering fabrics, ornate surfaces, and the performance of joy. But behind the embellishment, she was watching something else: how beauty can mask vulnerability, how colour can distract, and how appearances rarely tell the whole story.In this conversation, Russna reflects on growing up as the eldest daughter in a Punjabi household, moving through a biology degree and commercial design, and eventually choosing painting as the first place she didn’t need permission. She speaks openly about surviving a turning point that forced her to reconsider her path, and finding in abstraction a way to express what can’t always be said directly.We discuss repetition as persistence, restraint after excess, imperfection as revelation, and the friction between illusion and exposure. Her paintings appear immersive from a distance, but up close they intentionally misalign - revealing process, fracture, and the refusal of a perfect surface.Russna joins us from Vancouver as she prepares a new body of work for her upcoming exhibition at Cooper Cole, opening March 28.Russna Kaur (b. 1991, Brampton, Ontario) is a painter currently living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia. Kaur completed a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Waterloo (2013) and a Master of Fine Arts at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2019). Russna Kaur is the recipient of the Takao Tanabe Painting Prize (2020) and the IDEA Art Award (2020). She has exhibited works nationally at institutions including the Kamloops Art Gallery (2021), Remai Modern in Saskatoon, SK (2023), Vancouver Art Gallery (2024), Audain Art Museum in Whistler, BC (2024), College Art Galleries at the University of Saskatchewan (2025) and internationally at Galerie Isa in Mumbai, India (2023) and Gajah Gallery in Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2024). Kaur has an upcoming exhibition at the Art Gallery of Burlington in Ontario (2025).Kaur has been an artist-in-residence at the Burrard Arts Foundation (2020) in Vancouver, the Centrum Emerging Artist Residency (2020) in Port Townsend, Washington, an Independent Artist Residency in Los Angeles, California (2024), and the Wassaic Project in New York (2025). Upcoming residencies include the Annandale Artist Residency on Prince Edward Island (2025). Russna Kaur was commissioned to create public artwork for the Translink Art Columns in the City of Richmond, BC (2018), Boren Banner Series at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA (2021), Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives in Brampton, ON (2022) and Square Nine Developments in Burnaby, BC (2026).Kaur’s work is held in numerous private, corporate and institutional collections including the TD Bank Collection, RBC Art Collection, Audain Art Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Surrey Art Gallery, and the Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art.