BIOGRAPHY

Emilie Fantuz is a Vancouver-based artist whose oil paintings explore light, perception, and the passage of time through reflections and layered imagery. Fantuz’s work is rooted in observation. She captures ephemeral moments of everyday life and constructs images that hover between realism and abstraction. Her paintings collapse multiple moments into a single frame, exploring the tension between fleeting impressions and fixed forms. These works invite viewers to reconsider what is real, what is remembered, and how we navigate the ever-shifting visual landscape of contemporary life. Her unconventional application of paint—drawing the medium across the canvas with a palette knife—is part of her process of fracturing the image and disrupting clarity.

Currently pursuing an MFA at Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver, Fantuz is originally from southeastern Michigan and began painting while living in Hawaii—experiences in these vastly different places continue to inform the way she brings elements of place into her work. Her paintings have been presented across Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, including exhibitions at Revelstoke Public Art Gallery (BC), Christina Parker Gallery (NL), and Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead at MOCAD (Detroit, MI). She has participated in art fairs such as Art Toronto and Affordable Art Fair Battersea (London), and her work is held in collections including Bucci Developments (Vancouver), Henry Ford Hospital, and the Bank of Ann Arbor. Fantuz has received multiple awards, including from the International Guild of Realism, Emily Carr University, the Norval Morrisseau Award for Visual Arts, and the Canada Council for the Arts.