The Art Gallery of Bancroft hosted an opening reception on Friday for their May exhibition, titled Finding Community.
The exhibition features pieces that Elizabeth Broere Jackson and Kayla St-Pierre started working on while they each completed month-long residencies at the gallery in 2025.
Broere Jackson completed her residency in November. She splits her time between North Kawartha and Newfoundland, and said she was already quite familiar with Bancroft, but the residency was an opportunity to find the artist community here.
“I already know this community, but I didn’t know all the artists, and they all came in and it was amazing to talk to people that do the same thing that you do,” she said.
She said she has done lots of commissioned work in the past, but the residency inspired her to start creating more of what she wants to create.
“I’ve learned that I do not want to do commissions anymore, I’m sorry to say. Because I had so much fun doing what I wanted to do,” she said.
Kayla St-Pierre is based in Guelph and completed her residency a year ago, in May 2025.
She said her parents moved to the Bancroft area a few years ago, and the residency gave her the opportunity to get to know the community.
Much of her work in the gallery is based off photos she captured while exploring the area and getting to know its community of artists.
Though she works from photographs, St-Pierre said she tries to incorporate abstract pieces into her work rather than staying strictly in photo-realism. She said her art was heading in the direction of photo-realism, but she’s trying to push against it.
She said she puts her photographs into Procreate or Photoshop, and changes around features like the colours and cropping.
“I’m purposely trying to confuse the image a little bit. I call it found abstract because my brain does not work abstractly, but I’m kind of bored with photo-realism, so I’m trying to mediate it in a way, and a lot of that has been colour,” she said.
St-Pierre said while she’s always been driven towards art, her experience at the gallery sparked “an even more necessary drive.”
“It’s really cemented that art is not just something I will maybe get to one day, or maybe try to pursue. No, I’m actively pursuing art as a way of life,” she said.
“Not necessarily, like art is my full-time job, but art is my lifestyle.”
On the title wall for this month’s exhibition, both Broere Jackson and St-Pierre brought the community into their creative process.
Broere Jackson’s painting on the title wall contains portraits of all the people she met during her residency who inspired her. St-Pierre invited community members who came into the gallery during her residency to make contributions to her title wall piece.
Finding Community is on at the Art Gallery of Bancroft until May 30.
