Video Walk thRough

Wallace Edwards is a painter, illustrator and the award-winning author of over a dozen books for children. His first book Alphabeasts, published in 2002, won the Governor General’s Award (GG) for Children’s Book Illustration. He has exhibited in solo and group gallery shows and paintings by Wallace Edwards can be found in private and public collections throughout the world. In 2014, Wallace was selected for a Canada Council supported New Media Artist Residency held at the Future Cinema Lab at York University where he created his first work in Augmented and Virtual Reality. He continues to work in immersive media and has since exhibited his new media work internationally, including an augmented reality pop-up book at ELO Porto. Most recently he was awarded a Canada Council grant to improve both Canadian artists' and the wider public’s access, engagement and participation in virtual reality real-time creation tools and advance an inclusive vision for VR's future as an expressive technology. 

 Wally and Stella are family: uncle and niece who live 200 km apart in Canada. During the pandemic they were unable to visit each other in person, but both had Quest headsets and decided to meet regularly inside Multibrush VR – a co-creation environment where they could make art together, catch up and improve their skills. At the time, Wallace was the recipient of a grant from the Canada Council to teach and share virtual reality real-time creation tools and Stella became one of his key beta-testers. Stella created her first VR pieces with Wallace’s help and this submission represents one of many pieces of VR elit Wallace and Stella created together during the pandemic.