Edges of Becoming, 2026 is an ongoing collaboration between Jo O'Brien and M.E. Sparks, exploring practices that embrace uncertainty rather than seek to resolve it. Always in the midst of “figuring itself out”, the project recently struck a pose in the form of a workshop at University of Applied Arts Vienna. With a group of momentary collaborators, we experimented with methods of drawing and collage in response to looped video projections. Over one evening, we shared embodied, collaborative, and provisional ways of working together without a clear end in sight, building images and practices on the edge of becoming.

in_your_painting, 2022 is part of a series of browser-based works exploring quotation, collage, and language. Drawing from the history of Dada poetry, in_your_painting uses a hand-coded computer program to generate a series of phrases, which seem to lead us through someone else’s space. The narrative is partially constructed through a random sampling of titles from the mid-twentieth-century paintings of Balthus, all of which depict the young female body. Printed iterations of this work were included in the exhibitions and a Rag in the Other at the Alternator Centre and We can only hint at this with words at the Gordon Smith Gallery for Candian Art.

to-do-to-do, 2021 is a collaborative interactive website created by M.E. Sparks and Matthis Grunsky for the Number 3 Gallery SPAM series. The project, developed in the height of the COVID-19 lock-down, features a series of small hand-coded website that explore the act of list making as tool for navigating times of uncertainty and isolation. Special thanks to all the list-makers who shared their personal to-do lists with us.

Blank Page Melancholia, 2020 is a browser-based work created for the School for Poetic Computation's Digital Love Languages. The website samples from a collection of texts to generate ever-changing observations, affirmations and words of encouragement for anyone feeling stuck.

Shucks 1,2,3, 2020, Linocut on Stonehenge paper, 8” × 8”, edition of 4 per plate and artists proofs on Japanese paper. This work was printed in May, 2020 for Patio Press, a long-distance printmaking project co-founded by artists Sara-Jeanne Bourget and Mark Johnsen in Vancouver, BC.

Inside Out, 2018 was a collaborative project developed by M.E. Sparks and Matthis Grunsky with the mobile workspace Site Factory, in Vancouver, BC. Reconstructed studio objects (blank canvases, chairs, ladders, easels) are staged within the space of a modified school bus, becoming a fractured screen for a shifting projection of pattern and colour. The projected colours, sampled randomly from an archive of historical artworks, act as a method of mapping the transformation of three-dimensional space into a flattened, two-dimensional picture, mimicking the flat space of a painting. This project emerged from an exploration into the trope of the artist’s studio, its depiction throughout art history, and its relevance amidst a “post-studio” condition currently dictated by prohibitive rental costs.

LINEUP, 2016 was a collaborative exhibition with M.E. Sparks and Matthis Grunsky at the Helen For Now project space gallery. Together, M.E. and Matthis transform found, recycled objects through the use of the grid. The artists aim to alter how these objects are understood by obstructing and reordering the way they are usually perceived in their typical contexts. In her series of grid paintings, M.E. does this by imposing painted grids onto found plywood (pulled from city dumpsters), while Matthis uses a casting process in his wall hanging plaster tiles, capturing the surface textures of city sidewalks.