Juliana Gagné

Biography:

Juliana Gagné is an interdisciplinary artist and writer from the Northeast US. Juliana has an MFA from OCADU (2026 Interdisciplinary Art, Media and Design) and a BFA from Parsons School of Design (2018 Fine Arts). Juliana has exhibited their art in group and solo shows in the US, Canada, Germany and Spain; notably solo show Echoes of Water: They Called Her a Witch (2026 Canada), group show A Call for the Incomplete (2026 Canada) and solo show The Dream Dimension: Beyond the Veil (2025 US).

Juliana has been an active participant in the Experimental Photo Festival since its inception in 2020 in Barcelona. They have attended the festival every year and in 2020 and 2021 offered their own live workshops and artist talks with the community. The 2021 workshop “Magical Potions Cooking Class Part 2” is included in the curriculum of Agora, the year-round online school for experimental photography. In 2025 Juliana presented “sonic blasts” mapping out the city of Toronto with Michelle Gay at the Transforming Access Unconference hosted at OCAD University. Juliana is also actively involved with the Black Creek Community Farm and has led free workshops for children in the community. Juliana explores the experimental boundaries of photography and the moving image through a combination of analogue and digital processes.

Artist Statement:

I work with a variety of media to explore family stories, Place-Memory, the unconscious mind and feminism. Media include: illustration, installation, performance, sound/video art, printmaking, as well as experimental and ancient analogue photography techniques. My favorite experimental photography technique is film soup, and I have over the last 15+ years established a mastery of the Gagné Method, which involves souping an entire disposable camera. I have a research-intensive practice that often explore historical and family records, as well as a process of interviewing family and close friends to use segments from their audio in the videos that I produce.

I create experimental videos through multiple layers of audio, video and analogue photography. These videos tell non-linear narratives that blend multiple timelines and tell a multiplicity of family stories linked around a unified theme. The narratives and imagery are circular, and each video begins and ends with an invocation to open a “Portal” that connects me to my Ancestors and the Spirit World. Imagery of water and fire are ever present and hints at the ability of these sentient elements to act as an inter-dimensional Portal through time and space. The videos are often shot through frequency measuring instruments including prisms, sun catches and kaleidoscopes. This psychedelic imagery is layered over other digital videos as well as 35mm analogue film photos, with each layer having reduced opacity, creating ghostly figures. An ever-present shadow figure with antlers acts as a narrator throughout the videos, representing Ancestors, the free soul state and protective land Spirits. The audio is sourced from interviews with family members and close friends as a form of first-hand research and the sound bites often loop and echo. 

Through these videos I explore family stories, with a particular focus on my Ancestors who were accused of witchcraft in colonial New England. There are seven “witch” Ancestors in total, spanning across Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. three of my “witch” Ancestors (Mary Staples, Mary Harvey and Hannah Harvey) lived in my hometown of Fairfield, Connecticut and I focus most strongly on their stories. In particular, in the video Witches I tell the stories of these three Ancestors alongside my Grandmother discussing the feminist family she was raised in and my Mother talking about her experience being at the center of the Grunseth political scandal in Minnesota in 1990. My Mother discusses how it felt to have the entire country calling her a liar because she was brave enough to go public about the sexual abuse she endured at the hands of Jon Grunseth. The videos tie together historic wrongs committed against my Ancestors and the current political climate in the US and explores contemporary “witches”. The videos also explore Place-Memory, the memory associated with a certain location and its history and the supernatural through the unseen world and hauntings.