Festival Art Souterrain

Hrista Stefanova is a visual artist based in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal who employs printmaking and sculptural casting techniques to create impressions from both natural and human-made structures. She transforms their surfaces into temporary or organic materials, focusing on metal, clay, wax, and latex. Her work engages with the everyday and its inherent fragility, addressing themes of femininity, corporeality, memory, and transience. Stefanova is particularly drawn to transitional spaces—such as doorways, windows, and walls—as well as the subtle details that often go unnoticed in the environments we inhabit.

One of her techniques involves stretching cheesecloth over a surface and applying layers of latex.

Once hardened, these layers form a negative relief that creates a yellowish, skin-like, soft image. This method, similar to printmaking, follows the tradition of rubberizing textiles pioneered by artists like Eva Hesse and Heidi Bucher. Latex has an expected lifespan of around twenty years, reflecting the ongoing changes in the spaces it documents. The process captures delicate marks and textures in walls and objects, preserving elements such as dust, bricks, dirt, paint, and rust from construction, maintenance, or graffiti. The final images serve as ghostly mirrors of their matrix, embodying remnants of past interactions and transformations within those spaces.

Stefanova holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from NSCAD University (Halifax, NS) and is currently a Master of Fine Arts candidate in Sculpture and Ceramics at Concordia University (Montreal). She has exhibited in galleries across Canada and has undertaken public projects in Halifax and Charlottetown (PEI). Her professional experience includes working at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, Arts Council Windsor & Region, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje (North Macedonia), as well as teaching at NSCAD’s School of Extended Studies. In 2024, she was the RBC Emerging Artist in Residence at Art Windsor-Essex.