Artist Talk with Toni Cormier

Toni’s practice explores relationships between living beings and their environments through painting and visual storytelling.

Toni Cormier (BFA '19, Drawing) explores the shifting relationships between light, water, and the living world, and the complexity of social power systems. Through daily walks, sketches, en plein air studies, and observational research, Toni will spend time in the forests and observe water systems onsite, studying how light reveals, obscures, and transforms moments within the landscape. 

Encounters between animals, insects, plants, people, and water become starting points for visual narratives exploring kinship, agency, desire, power, and speculative futures.

Through drawing, painting, and field studies, Toni will be working on developing a new series of intimate oil paintings developed from time spent in close relationship with the land.

Toni Cormier is a visual artist based in Mohkinstsis (Calgary, Alberta). Working primarily in painting and sculpture, she explores relationships and social power dynamics through the metaphor of sport fishing. Scenes of play, deception, absurdity, and social roles happen over a backdrop of dream-like landscapes.

Cormier graduated with distinction from the Alberta University of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with distinction in Drawing. She exhibited at Herringer Kiss Gallery in Surface, Surface and participated in BUMP’s 2025 Road Works Festival. Calgary Arts Development has generously supported her. Cormier maintains an active role in the Mohkinstis arts community as an artist and arts programmer, including her current position at National accessArts Centre as the 2D Painting/Drawing Faculty.