Míša Š.

[they/he]

BFA Visual Studies, 6th year

Míša Š. (they/he) is an artist, craftsperson, and arts educator currently based on Treaty 7 land but originally from Czechia. Their primary mediums are printmaking and analog photography, focusing conceptually on the Disabled experience, matrilineal relationships, and generational trauma. Míša strives to make works which question what we view as Fine Art, and to give voice to those who have been ‘Othered’. Their work has been exhibited around Canada and published internationally.

a house on fire [assembled], 2025, Double-sided CMY silkscreen print and cyanotype print on paper, glued to be 3-dimensional; 3" x 3.5" x 3.5"

This piece explores the concept of gifted legacies that our families and cultures pass down to us. I often think about the concept of being gifted an inheritance of pain from those who came before you, both your direct parents/grandparents, but also in the culture that you were raised in. Slavic cultures, while holding a shared history of totalitarianism, tend to value emotionless-ness, and anger is often considered one of the more acceptable feelings to express. This is a view that I inherited from my family, and have worked very hard to dismantle.

Czech/Slovak wallpaper and rug patterns are cyanotype printed onto one side of this piece, while all-consuming flames are cyanotype printed on the other, referencing this collective cultural anger. This juxtaposition of motifs mimics the love that I hold for a culture which has also passed down this anger as a survival method. The text, “i was born into a house on fire,” speaks on my experiences of inheriting a culture of anger, and growing up in a house where this went unchecked. In this piece, I am quite literally recreating that domestic space as one of both immense care and immense rage.