ROXANNE BROUSSEAU-FELIO
"The Architecture of Letting Go
Ageless Creative Expressions"OCTOBER 1024, 2026
DTLA ART NIGHT RECEPTION
OCTOBER 1, 6-10pm
Artist's Statement
There are moments when memory loosens its hold, yet something luminous remains.
A gesture.
A colour.
A hand moving across paper.
A sudden recognition.
A spark of presence.
My work begins in these moments.
The Architecture of Letting Go emerged from time spent creating alongside older adults living within the shifting landscapes of ageing, dementia, memory loss, and physical change. In those spaces, I witnessed life moving at another rhythm. Time seemed to soften. Stories fragmented. Words sometimes disappeared. And yet emotion remained—immediate, unmistakable, and profoundly alive.
When the narrative of a life begins to loosen, the present can become astonishingly clear. I carried these encounters back to my studio.
There, alone with canvas, pigment, texture, and memory, I began to process what could not easily be spoken: the tenderness of fragile hands, the gravity of changing bodies, the sorrow of disappearance, and the startling beauty of someone becoming completely present through the act of creating.
I remember moments when a stroke of blue or a sudden edge of gold seemed to open a door. For an instant, diagnosis fell away.
There was only color.
Gesture.
Choice.
Presence.
There was fligt!
My studio became a second room of encounter—a private landscape where the emotional traces of therapeutic work could be transformed rather than carried silently. Layer upon layer, I began building and dismantling surfaces, allowing memory and forgetting, grief and gratitude, attachment and release to occupy the same space.
This is where the title The Architecture of Letting Go lives.
Letting go is not emptiness. It has structure.
It has thresholds, walls, fractures, openings, and places where light enters. It is emotional. Physical. Psychological.
Sometimes we build structures to protect what remains. Sometimes those same structures must soften so that something new can emerge.
As an Art Therapist, my personal studio practice is inseparable from this process. It is where I return to the vulnerability of making without answers. It reminds me that creativity does not depend upon perfect memory, language, strength, or certainty. It can exist before explanation and beyond diagnosis.
The individuals who inspired these works taught me this repeatedly.
Their living environments changed from residence to residence, yet something essential remained: when a space was created for authentic expression, connection often appeared in unexpected ways.
A mark could become a voice.
A colour could become a memory without needing to name it.
A painting could become a place to exist fully in the now.
Although I paint alone, I am never entirely alone in the studio.
The room is inhabited by echoes: fragile hands resisting the gravity of changing bodies, bursts of colour appearing without hesitation, and those extraordinary moments when someone seemed to step outside the boundaries imposed upon them and simply create.
To witness that kind of presence changed me.
It taught me to stay with a moment rather than trying to preserve it.
These paintings are my way of holding those encounters lightly.
They explore the fragile terrain where taking flight and letting go happen together—where memory meets forgetting, sorrow meets release, and what is disappearing can still leave behind something radiant.
My work returns again and again to one enduring human paradox:
How do we take flight creatively while learning to let go at the exact same time?
Artist Biography
Roxanne Brousseau-Félio (~ rX) is a Canadian artist, producer, educator, and Art Therapist whose practice moves between fine art, digital media, storytelling, and the emotional landscapes of human experience.
With a background spanning multimedia production, education, and Art Psychotherapy, her work is shaped by a longstanding fascination with the ways images can communicate beyond language. Drawing on more than a decade of creative production across Canada, the United States, and Europe, she explores memory, presence, transformation, and connection through both artistic and therapeutic practice.
Roxanne holds a Master’s degree in Educational Media Technology from Texas A&M University and a diploma in Art Psychotherapy. Her artwork has reached audiences in more than 35 countries and has been represented for many years by the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art.
At the heart of her practice is an interest in non-verbal storytelling—the places where image, gesture, memory, and human connection speak when words no longer can.
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