Victoria Stusiak (b.1977, Burnaby, B.C) received her BFA with distinction (Painting and Drawing Major) from Concordia University in 2005. She currently works as a figurative painter and printmaker in Montréal, Quebec. She has also been a studio assistant and printer to John Fox and Tom Hopkins. In 2010-11 She will be attending the graduate painting program at Central Saint Martins school in London, England. Victoria Stusiak has been awarded The Stevenson Scholarship in 2004, The Elizabeth Greenshields Scholarship in 2004 and 2009 and was a finalist in the Kingston Portrait Prize in 2007. She has exhibited and sold her work in Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton and Halifax. Victoria Stusiak's subject matter ranges from intimate portraits to more complex arrangements of the human form. Her portrait images are studies in measured observation that examine the subtleties of gesture in defining character. In her paintings and works on paper of two men fighting, the images contain iconographical references to Hellenistic sculptures and the artifice of Italian Mannerism. She avoids the use of either ideal form or narrative context. Instead, Stusiak focuses attention on the interaction between the bodies with the surrounding space, which situates the figures both in and beyond a specific time and place. The primary content in all of Stusiak's work is the contemplative experience of art on the part of the artist and the viewer.