Nov 12 | Lunch and Learn with Jess Riva Cooper
Wednesday, November 12, 2025
12:30 to 1:30 PM
Free | Online | Zoom link provided upon registration
About the Program
Take your lunch break with us and join a free online talk with Jess Riva Cooper, featured artist from the Varley Art Gallery’s fall exhibition Sights of Convergence. This session offers insight into Cooper’s creative process and current work.
About the Artist
Jess Riva Cooper is a Toronto-based multi-media artist whose work integrates clay, drawing, and other materials to create intricate sculptures and installation-based artworks. Her pieces often explore themes of mythology, nature, and transformation, blending human and botanical imagery in ways that evoke vulnerability and resilience. In her sculptures, nature reclaims space, with plant forms sprouting, creeping over structures, and creating preternatural transformations that subvert order and invite chaos.
Cooper holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) and a Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Her artistic practice is shaped by residencies at Medalta, The Archie Bray Foundation, and the Kohler Arts/Industry Program, among others.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto and the Cynthia Corbett Gallery in London. Through her sculptures, Cooper addresses ecological concerns and cultural storytelling, encouraging reflection on the interconnectedness of life, decay, and renewal.
About the Exhibition
Sights of Convergence features work by Jess Riva Cooper (Toronto, ON), Gabriela García-Luna (Saskatoon, SK), and Stanzie Tooth (Toronto, ON). Each artist brings a distinct material practice and set of concerns to their work, yet all explore the intimate entanglement of human and natural worlds. Rather than treating nature as a passive backdrop, their works invite us to consider a more nuanced, reciprocal exchange, one shaped by perception, memory, and lived experience. Beneath the surface, unsettling realities emerge: anxiety, tension, loss, and the shadow of ecological catastrophe. In this shared space, the gallery becomes a meeting ground, where diverse expressions converge and conversations between works and ideas can take root, grow, and expand.
