2022 Winter Holiday Party

Olex Wlasenko (Curator – Whitby Station Gallery, Ontario)

Olex Wlasenko has based his studio practice in Oshawa, Ontario after earning a Master of Fine Arts at The University of Western Ontario in 2000. Prior to this, he graduated with distinction from the Ontario College of Art (OCA) in 1994, going on to complete a degree in Fine Arts at the
University of Guelph.

In his final year at OCA,  Wlasenko was awarded the Eric Freifield Award. In 2001 and 2011, he won top prize at the national juried drawing exhibition organized at the John B. Aird Gallery. The artist was awarded Canada Council for the Arts Creation / Production Grants in 2001, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008 and 2010 also regularly receiving grants from the Ontario Arts Council since 2001.

In 2002, 2004, 2005 and 2006 the artist won Best Drawing Award at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition. A solo exhibition of his drawings premiered at Barrie, Ontario’s MacLaren Art Centre in fall, 2007. Wlasenko has exhibited extensively in Toronto and London, ON, nationally in Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton and Dawson City, Yukon, and internationally in Florence, Italy and Kyiv, Ukraine.

After completing his graduate studies, Wlasenko worked as Assistant Curator at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery (RMG) in Oshawa, Ontario. There he organized over twenty photography exhibitions featuring vintage prints that document the historical development of his hometown of Oshawa. Wlasenko has curated over 80 exhibitions, including Broken Promises: Soviet
Photography in the Age of Stalin at the MacLaren Art Centre, Vera Jacyk: Chysto, Chysto,
Chysto, Brendan Fernandes: Dada Afrika, Toni Latour: The Femme Project, Meryl McMaster: In Between Worlds and most recently Marie-Josée | Microcosms-Macrocosms. Olex has been the Curator at Whitby’s Station Gallery since February 2008.