14 January – 8 April 2025
1640 Electra Boulevard, Sidney, BC
Daily, 3:30am – 1:30am
The venue at YYJ is the café area before security
About the Artist:
Carol Cross, Ph.D., has professional experience that includes introducing arts experiences in nontraditional settings, working with adults and adolescents experiencing homelessness, incarceration, and with at-risk and high-risk youth. She has also taught at the university level.
A visual artist and arts educator, Cross holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, British Columbia. Her Master’s thesis focused on the social benefits of establishing sustainable community programs, and education as social intervention for youths at-risk. In her efforts to build positive social change and early intervention in schools, and raise awareness of violence as a social problem; with the support of Provincial and Government of Canada funding, she set up a free, after-school photography and writing program for inner-city teens in Vancouver.
Awarded a Government of Canada contract, she began working with incarcerated male and female teens in British Columbia. Her doctoral research, a qualitative study, examined critical pedagogy, adolescent development, and research into the governance and policies surrounding incarcerated male and female youth.
She is the author of two books: Juvenile Justice and Expressive Arts: Creative Disruptions through Art Programs for and with Teens in a Correctional Institution.
Her latest, Justice-Involved Youth: Healing through Trauma with Creativity and Community Regeneration + The Peer-Support Workbook, will be released in May 2025. Both are published by Routledge, London and New York, and sold internationally.
She continues to advocate for best practices for the rehabilitation and reintegration of institutionalized children and youth; and the potential of the transformative arts in nontraditional settings, working with individuals experiencing homelessness, incarceration, and as prevention and early intervention for children and adolescents in schools. She holds a PhD from the University of Victoria. She currently resides in Victoria, British Columbia.
About the Work:
Born in Montréal, I am a graduate of Vancouver’s Emily Carr University of Art + Design. In 2010, the University of Victoria, Archives and Special Collections, acquired my graduate exhibition, consisting of multiple media (photographs, textural records, graphic materials and objects). I have been exhibiting my artwork as early as 1989.
An abstract painter, my medium of expression is color. In this recent series, I am simplifying my paintings to increase their intensity—transcending the boundaries of conventional representation by allowing colors and shapes to guide the evolution of each canvas. Produced according to the precepts of abstraction formulated by Québec’s Automatists, which put the object aside to simplify intensity with color composition. Some colors become stronger while others demand peace and quiet— influencing each other considerably in a psychological sense, as do shapes. All canvases are 24 x 24 inches.
The color development is not necessarily the same as the formal development. Independent as it is, it overlaps with the overall development of the composition. Color development follows its own laws—when mutually related everything makes its mark on another thing.
The author of two books, Juvenile Justice and Expressive Arts: Creative Disruptions through Art Programs for and with Teens in a Correctional Institution (2018/19), and Justice-Involved Youth: Healing through Trauma with Creativity and Community Regeneration + Peer-Support Workbook (May 2025). Both books published by Routledge, London and New York, are sold internationally.
Email: chromazonestudio@gmail.com
