Opening reception: Friday, March 13, 2026 from 5pm – 8pm
Artist talk & demo: Saturday, March 14 at 1pm
Exhibition run: March 13 – April 17, 2026
Free and open to the public
Martha Street Studio is pleased to present I am holding my jpegs as tightly as I can, a solo exhibition by Agata Garbowska.
Drawing on personal archives—family photographs, personal photography, and previously printed works—I am holding my jpegs as tightly as I can is a collection of remembered fragments, printed and assembled into imagined spaces. Select fragments appear again and again; repeatedly re-photographed, re-printed, and re-collaged. With each repetition, colours shift and edges blur. As printed information is discarded, lost, or overwritten, prints begin to more closely resemble a memory, softened by the passage of time. Through collage and print media processes, I make my memories tangible, something that I can hold.
The artist would like to thank the Manitoba Arts Council for their support of this project.
Artist Statement:
In my artistic practice, I draw on my photography and photographs found in family albums to explore memory and print media as hauntings. My personal hauntings include excised photographic information, repeating imagery, and the visual artifacts of photography, print media, and collage. Throughout my practice, I propose that the hauntings of print media—resulting from contact1 between matrix and paper—parallel the hauntings of memory, of our contact with one another. By repeatedly re-assembling personal photographs, I build ongoing archives which emphasize photographs as an incomplete record. Encouraging artifacts and loss in printed images, I explore the blurring, overwriting, and forgetting characteristic of my experiences of memory, while arranging my hauntings into provisional, nostalgic, and hopeful personal archives.
Within my collaged images, only the remnants of figures remain: plants, lights, a hand holding a precious belonging. Like my memories, the prints are full of gaps, blurring, evasions, and repetition. Though my printed interior spaces and their objects are chosen for their personal association—emotionally charged to me—I believe that the negative space in each collaged image and installation work allows viewers to connect with each image through their own experiences. The specifics are decipherable only to me, while the viewer has the opportunity to fill each interior space with their own memories.
While presenting a provisional record of memory, I ask, when do loops of re-printing, re-contextualizing, re-collaging slip into nostalgia? When do built worlds begin to resemble ruins?
1 I am referencing art historian Jennifer L. Roberts’ lectures on the conceptual implications of print media processes. The six-part lecture series, titled “Contact: Art and the Pull of Print”, took place 2021 for the National Gallery of Art and can be found online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiasyX2h22g&list
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Artist Bio:
Agata Garbowska is a print-media artist living in Treaty 1 Territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In her artistic practice, she uses collage and photographic print processes to explore incidents of haunting in relation to print media, memory, and time. Born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, she holds a BFA from the University of Alberta and in 2024 earned an MFA in printmaking from the University of Manitoba. In 2021 she completed an Emerging Artist Residency at the Society for Northern Alberta Print-Artists. Since completing this residency, she spends as much time as possible in her local community printshop.
For more information on Agata’s practice, visit agatagarbowska.com or @Agata_Garbowska on Instagram.
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Hours, Location, Accessibility:
Gallery hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 10AM – 5PM
*closed Saturdays of long weekends
Martha Street Studio is located at 11 Martha Street. A loading zone is located on the street at the front of the building. Martha Street Studio is an accessible space with a lift and two accessible gender-neutral washrooms located on the second floor.