21 wade ave, unit 2, toronto

Mia Sandhu | The Sky is green | 12 SEPTEMBER – 17 October 2026

When the world becomes overwhelming, we reach for what we can: fragments of beauty, traces of memory, and the small things that offer comfort.

Mia Sandhu’s new exhibition unfolds as an immersive landscape suspended between the domestic and the natural world. Large-scale silk paintings in muted sunset hues, alongside handmade flowers, dried arrangements, preserved insects, and suspended objects, transform the gallery into a place of gathering and refuge. In these shifting environments, nude female figures emerge in India ink and charcoal, their bodies exposed and faces obscured through smudged, gestural marks and shadows. Those familiar with Sandhu’s previous work may recognize these enigmatic women as recurring protagonists in her exploration of femininity, intimacy, vulnerability, and selfhood. Yet here, surrounded by fragments of nature and carefully assembled comforts, they inhabit a world that is at once tender and uneasy, familiar and strange.

As a second-generation Canadian of Punjabi Sikh descent, Sandhu’s practice draws from intersecting cultural and personal narratives, placing the female figure in dialogue with foliage, ornament, and domesticity. Her imagined environments merge interiors with sparse, dreamlike landscapes, where cultural inheritance, nostalgia, and contemporary instability intersect. Within this shifting terrain, questions of home, selfhood, intimacy, and belonging remain open, allowing the familiar to become strange and the personal to resonate beyond itself.

Among these muted tones, a singular work rendered predominantly in green departs from the sunset palette, its green sky lending an unexpected hue to the exhibition’s title. The Sky is Green evokes the uncanny stillness before an approaching rupture, when the familiar world begins to feel unfamiliar and the air hums with tension. The phrase also gestures toward the disorientation of witnessing something that feels undeniably present while simultaneously difficult to name or collectively acknowledge. Against a cultural landscape marked by instability, ecological anxiety, emotional exhaustion, and fractured relationships with ourselves and others, Sandhu’s work suggests the value of sitting with this uncertainty, rather than attempting to resolve it. The sky becomes a space suspended between what is real and what one believes to be true. Certainty remains just out of reach, much like the exhibition’s obscured figures and shifting landscapes. This sense of uncertainty extends into Sandhu’s materials and process.

Expanding from her familiar use of watercolour and gouache on paper, Sandhu allows the material to shape the making of the work, embracing an element of unpredictability. Silk becomes more than a surface for painting; its texture, movement, and delicacy evoke memory, fragility, and preservation. The ornamental hanging structures further extend these ideas, carrying traces of cultural memory and inherited symbolism. By allowing herself to become immersed in the process, Sandhu allows new possibilities to emerge through attention, patience, and feeling.

Natural and collected materials coexist with carefully constructed forms, creating an environment that moves between the domestic and organic, the familiar and the unfamiliar. These arrangements suggest a form of homemaking that extends beyond the construction of a physical interior, becoming an act of gathering, preserving, and caring. Within this environment, nature and whimsy offer moments of softness, while the presence of dried and preserved materials quietly acknowledges fragility and impermanence. The resulting installation becomes a space for pause and refuge, where beauty and care can provide comfort amid the overwhelming feelings that surround us.

Despite the uncertainty that permeates the exhibition, softness persists. Flowers are gathered, silk is suspended, and fragments of the natural world are given new life. Among these traces, Sandhu creates a place to pause—a space where vulnerability can coexist with comfort, and where even overwhelming feelings may make room for tenderness.

—Jayda Gardner

Mia Sandhu is a Punjabi-Canadian artist currently residing in Toronto, Ontario. Her multidisciplinary practice explores themes of femininity, sexuality, cultural hybridity, self- authenticity, and safety. Expressed through her playful paper and gouache/watercolour-based works, Sandhu seeks to examine inner conflicts seemingly intrinsic to womanhood while also challenging more abstract concepts like unrequited assimilation and cultural dysphoria.

Sandhu earned her BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2009 and has since participated in residencies at Cotton Factory and Smokestack Studios, both located in Hamilton, Ontario. She has shown work at New Arts Projects, London, UK; Jonathan Hopson Gallery, Houston; Smokestack Gallery, Hamilton, as well as large fairs such as Felix Art Fair, Los Angeles; Feria Material, Vol.12! Mexico; and Art Toronto. Sandhu’s work is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Jayda Gardner is an artist and student in her final year at York University, where she is completing her BFA in Visual Art. Her practice explores spirituality, nature, and our interconnectedness with the universe. Working across painting, drawing, and mixed media, Gardner experiments with a range of materials and techniques to explore these ideas through both intuitive and process-driven approaches. As an emerging artist and future art educator, Gardner is interested in the power of art to encourage curiosity, reflection, and a deeper connection to ourselves, one another, and the natural world.