Members’ Gallery
From the Ashes
By Ashlynn Doljac
May 1 – June 13, 2026
Opening Reception: May 8, 2026
Image Credits: Courtesy of the artist.
About the Exhibition
From the Ashes is an exploration of what remains after rupture—and what dares to grow in its wake. Rooted in themes of intergenerational trauma, familial lineage, and enduring love, my body of work moves through cycles of destruction, grief, and quiet renewal. Ash becomes a central metaphor: what has been burned is not lost, but transformed—carried forward in new forms.
Through layered materials, symbolic imagery, and intimate gestures, the work considers the body as an archive—holding memory, pain, and tenderness across time. Threads of ancestry weave through each piece, tracing the invisible inheritances we carry and the ways we attempt to mend them. There is no singular narrative of healing here, but rather a constellation of moments: fragmentation, resistance, release, and reassembly.
As an artist of European ancestry living and working as a settler on Indigenous land, I acknowledge that this work is created on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, within the lands protected by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant. This acknowledgment is not a conclusion but an ongoing responsibility—one that asks for continued reflection, accountability, and respect for the lands and communities whose presence precedes and continues beyond my own.
From the Ashes invites viewers to sit with the nuances of becoming—to witness both the beauty and brutality of transformation, and to consider what it means to rebuild from what once felt unlivable.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ashlynn is a multidisciplinary artist, poet, painter, and art educator whose work moves through intergenerational trauma, familial lineage, healing, and the quiet persistence of love. Her work has been exhibited at Gallery 1313 in Toronto and SHO Gallery in Windsor.
Working across painting, poetry, and sculptural forms, she approaches art as a way of holding what is often difficult to name—tracing what is inherited, what lingers, and what can be transformed. Her practice is rooted in lived experience, where grief and tenderness exist side by side, and where making becomes a process of release, repair, and return.
Of Croatian descent, Ashlynn lives and works on the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Anishinaabe nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. This awareness shapes her relationship to land and informs an ongoing commitment to practicing with care, accountability, and attention to what it means to carry history forward.
