BIO
Sandeep Johal is a Canadian visual artist, advocate, and leader whose practice engages drawing, collage, textiles, and large-scale murals. Through her Indo-folk feminine aesthetic, she confronts themes of bleakness, despair and ugliness with their dissonant opposites: brightness, hope and beauty. Johal’s work typically centers around the stories of women and while she highlights female suffering in its many forms, these are ultimately stories of resistance and resilience.
Johal has worked on a number of notable site-specific commissions including a mural for the Vancouver Art Gallery’s inaugural #SpotlightVanArtRental project (2021-22), a digital projection mapping for Facade Festival produced by Burrard Arts Foundation (2019), and a 4,000 sf collaborative mural project for Vancouver Mural Festival, which centred around the Komagata Maru Episode and involved the denaming of the federal building it was painted on (2019). Her work was part of the group exhibition In/Visible: Body as Reflective Site through the McClure Gallery and Visual Arts Centre in Montreal in partnership with the IMPACTS Project (2019).
Johal’s clients include Apple, the Vancouver Canucks, Vancouver Whitecaps FC, Holt Renfrew, Lululemon, and Earls Restaurant Group as well as the University of British Columbia's Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies and Simon Fraser University’s Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue. She has been an artist-in-residence at Burrard Arts Foundation (2021) and Indian Summer Festival (2018) and is the 2019 recipient of the Darpan Magazine Artistic Visionary Award. Johal’s work is held in numerous collections, including the Global Affairs Canada Visual Art Collection Program (Canadian Embassy, San Salvador), Surrey Art Gallery, and the Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art.
Johal holds a Diploma in Fine Arts (honours) from Langara College (2007) and a Degree in Education from the University of British Columbia (2002). She lives and works in Vancouver, BC, Canada.