OLDS — For a couple of weeks, École Olds High School (ÉOHS) art students had a chance to interact with an artist-in-residence.
Santosh Korthiwada, 47, moved to Alberta from India in 2018. He and his family now live in Calgary.
He makes collages from a collection 7,000 to 10,000 photos he’s taken over the past couple of decades or so.
Some were displayed in the art room at the high school during his residency, which began in late February and ended March 6.
Korthiwada also gave a well-received talk about his work March 3 at the Fine Arts Building.
A travelling exhibition of selected Korthiwada’s works called Inseparable Fragments is touring the province until September 2026 through the Alberta Foundation for the Arts' Travelling Exhibition (TREX) program.
“The project is based on how my memories have changed and transformed after I moved here, and how it impacted my creative process,” Korthiwada said during an interview with the Albertan.
“It's about memory displacement, migration, everything.”
Korthiwada didn’t start out as an artist.
He took applied arts at a university in India and became manager of information technology, learning and development.
Korthiwada took up photography as a hobby and was instantly hooked. He moved to the U.S., got a master’s degree in photography and art became his career.
Art teacher Renu Mathew and Bev Toews, an academic coach and indigenous liaison at ÉOHS learned of the exhibition of his work and brought Korthiwada and some of his artwork to the school for the residency.
“Bev started talking to me about if there is a possibility of me doing an artist residency here, spend some time with arts, photography, social studies, language arts students,” he said.
Korthiwada said the idea was not just for him to talk about his art and how he does it, but also “to talk about my experiences growing up in India, how I interpret images.
“What are the differences I faced after I moved here? How did it impact my art? All those kind of things. So just basically spend some time with the students and share stories.”
Korthiwada has been delighted by the interaction he’s had with ÉOHS students and the questions they ask.
“When I was a student, I didn't have an opportunity to even talk about art or do art in my school, I didn't even have an art teacher. But you know, they have so much exposure, so much wealth of knowledge,” he said.
“I was telling Renu and Bev that in a heartbeat, I would move here to Olds and be a teacher if life allows me to do it, because it's I think it's just fantastic.”
He said some questions he’s been asked are, ‘did you capture (scenes) every day? How did you make all these images? Did you travel a lot? Are there any specific places that you went?’
One question in particular intrigued him.
“I don't remember who asked me, but one of the students asked me, like, ‘do you do you make the picture in your head first and then implement it, or you start implementing it, and then it becomes a picture or an art piece?’
“I never really thought about my own creative process that way, so it kind of put me in a ‘oh, yeah, this is a good question, let me little more think about it.’ But I have done pictures in both ways,” he said.
Korthiwada said in one case, “I just woke up from my dream in the middle of the night and I started working on it.
“There was another picture where I had to make a design first and then see if I can convert that into an art piece.”
Korthiwada described photography as “a deductive medium.”
“You see a big scene, and then you condense your frame, you point it to a certain frame which you like. You remove everything else. You only capture what you need.”
In contrast, he found doing collages of photographs to be “liberating.”
“It was the exact opposite of what I used to do,” he said. “It's an additive process. You start on a blank canvas, nothing is there, just blank white space.
“You put one picture there. You add another picture, you add the third, the fourth, fifth. You remove couple of pictures, you keep building it.
“So whatever I used to do, this gave me a chance to do the reverse, and I think it kind of liberated me.”
Grade 12 student Milo Wood was one of the art students who interacted with Korthiwada and his work.
“He just seems very deep, you know what I mean? Like he has a lot of stories to tell,” Wood said.
“I’m not the biggest fan of collages, but I think it was cool in a way that he formatted everything and how he adapted perspectives in his pieces.
“There’s one we have in the classroom where it’s people at the edge of a river and some people are big and some people are small and I think that’s really cool.”
That said, Wood said he’s not about to do collages as a result of this experience.
“I think I prefer painting and drawing,” he said. “It feels more loose and I feel like I can do more with it, anything you want.”
Summer Nelson, another Grade 12 student, said, “I think it’s really unique and really inspiring how he’ll use his old work and old photography and then make it into something new.
“There’s one photo where there’s a bunch of bananas and when I look at it, it’s all my eye looks at and I’m curious why he chose to put it in there.”
Nelson said she’s interested in photography but doesn’t think she’s very good at it.
She prefers ceramics.
“I like to be able to make something 3D with my hands and I’m not the best at drawing,” she said.
