Kenna Robinson: With My Whole Body
Student Gallery
May 6–June 13, 2026
With My Whole Body explores the power dynamics of traditional portrait photography, where the operator often controls the image while the sitter has little agency. Responding to this, the artist merges photographer and subject using the cyanotype printmaking process. Rather than posing for a camera, the body physically touches a sensitized surface, creating images over extended exposures that capture presence and movement. Fabric cyanotypes are then sculpted into three-dimensional forms, combining fragments of the body to produce a tactile, collaborative image. The work challenges conventional photographic representation and invites viewers to reconsider authorship, presence, and recognition in portraiture.
Kenna Robinson, Photographic Body 01, 2023, cyanotype on cotton with fixative. Courtesy of the artist
Artist Biography
Kenna Robinson
Kenna Robinson is a photo-based artist from the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak, and Attawandaron peoples (London, Ontario). Primarily interested in the ways presence, physicality, and perception are felt through photographic and para-photographic processes, Robinson’s practice encompasses performance, collage, instructional, and cameraless methodologies. Grounded in a history of conceptual and feminist makers, Robinson explores the ontology of the camera apparatus and the phenomenology of the photographic moment. Robinson holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography Media Arts from Toronto Metropolitan University (2025) and is currently completing a Master of Fine Arts at NSCAD University in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), Nova Scotia.
