21 wade ave, unit 2, toronto

Balint Zsako | Tango | 7 March – 25 April, 2026

Seeing Through

Colleen Heslin’s artistic practice has long involved stitching various — often neglected or abandoned — elements together into a renewed and striking whole. Taking a critical perspective on patriarchal art and art histories is another longstanding theme. Many of the 2010s works for which Heslin first became widely known, for instance, consisted ofsecondhand fabrics literally sewn together to form large abstract paintings.

In her newer works, Heslin continues to piece recovered material elements together in pleasing, incisive and unexpected ways. But many of the materials, supports and frames are different than in the past, shifting in texture, colour and scale. And many are sourced from the forests and outbuildings around Heslin’s studio in quathet, B.C., rather than big-city thrift stores or stoops.

It’s a kind of reset, a shift after a one-year break away from making. These works, which the artist sometimes calls “material poems,” offer fresh ways to consider fiber and armature, painting and painting support, opacity and transparency. They conjure a seeing through – both in the sense of continuing a practice and in the sense of a penetrating perception.

Burlap is one material prominent in several of Heslin’s newer wall works. It’s a material that shows its own making more plainly than most canvas or linen does, offering, on occasion, a loose unevenness of weave, a countergrid of rectangles gently, irregularly bent.

When stretched over one of Heslin’s cedar or Douglas fir frames, the burlap can also become a sieve, a mesh, a scrim; it’s easy to see the frame and white wall beneath. For some works, Heslin removes threads from the burlap’s warp or weft, suggesting the space between two trees on the one hand and the creation of riverine straits on the other.

Another material noticed in some of Heslin’s more recent works is costume jewellery —a dangly, golden earring carefully placed on a burlap painting, for instance, or an animal-figurine necklace draped into a reclaimed-lumber sculpture. In context and in contrast with the dun, earthy hues of these wood and fabric substrates, the jewellery result in a productive tension and humour — a consideration of what it might mean to adorn an adornment.

Black fur and neon shoelaces are some of the other adornment-evoking materials that Heslin integrates into recent found-wood and found-lumber sculptures. These assemblages insist, perhaps, that what are still so often marginalized as feminine and queer practices of decoration, fashion and dress be as art-historically respected as masculinized, heteropatriarchal abstract-sculptural art stories are.

Text is another newly foregrounded element in some of Heslin’s works. She has long paid close attention to titling of her pieces, but more recently has moved to integrate text into the surfaces of her paintings and sculptures. This reflects, perhaps, the truth that language – art historical and so much otherwise – shapes possibilities, conditions, visions and spaces, while the reverse can also be true.

Heslin’s interests in language, sculpture and critique of art-historical gender biases converge in The Last Woman Standing. This multimedia work includes a 2016 letter to the British Museum, in which Heslin requested that the word “unflattering” be removed from the curatorial label for an 11 B.C. Assyrian sculpture of a woman’s torso. In the years since, Heslin has tracked quiet changes to that label and worked on a figural homage in soapstone and maple.

Some diagonal sculptural works of Heslin’s overtly bridge wall and floor. These are structures that can lead the gaze up or down — recalling steps or staircases, yes, but also rickrack, that flat-yet-flashy zigzag clothing trim, or the edges of pinking shears, those specialized scissors whose manner of cutting prevents cut fabric from fraying.

Disused doors, another material Heslin has started to deploy, suggest (like steps or stairs) a flip-flop, dialectic or duality — these are things that have 2 sides or modes, are portals to different levels, rooms, states or spaces.

In an era in which the ultrasmooth, backlit glass phone screen has become the sine qua non portal or window, I’m not surprised that I feel drawn to many of these works Heslin has created of late, and to their textural, material and spatial richness.

— Leah Sandals (she/they) is a bi+ writer and editor based in Tkaronto.

Colleen Heslin is a third generation European settler born in 1976 on the traditional territory of the Anishnabeg, Chippewa, Haudenosaunee and Wentat. They live and work as an uninvited guest in the qathet regional district on traditional territory of the Tla’amin Nation. Known for her innovative textile-based methods, Heslin’s work considers queerness and modes of decolonization that de-center western constructed cannons, calling into focus undervalued labor and materials in expanded fields of cultural production. Founder of The Crying Room Projects (1999-2015), Heslin facilitated exhibitions and a public mural space for emerging artists in Vancouver. Heslin has an MFA from Concordia University and is the winner of the 2013 RBC Painting Competition. With solo exhibitions at Monte Clark and Forest City Gallery, qathet Art Centre, Charles H.Scott Gallery, Esker Foundation and McMichael Canadian Art Collection. Heslin’s group exhibitions include The National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Art Windsor-Essex, Kamloops Art Gallery, Power Plant, Morris Helen Belkin Art Gallery and Burnaby Art Gallery. Heslin’s work has been exhibited and published in Canada, the United States, and Europe.