Past Exhibitions | 2022
Kim Dorland | Where are all the protest songs?
Toronto | 20 October - 10 December 2022
What is a landscape artist left to paint when we’ve burned, bulldozed, plowed, flooded or paved over all the landscapes? [Where are all the protest songs?] might be the answer to that question too. One could call this work apocalyptic, it's undeniably macabre in places and some of the imagery terrifying, but that would overlook another energy that runs through the work. The energy of an artist grappling with what the future holds, for him, his family, his world.
Nathan Eugene Carson | Blessings, Onward
Toronto | 20 October - 19 November, 2022
Using paper and cardboard with various qualities and types of paints, this unaffected approach enables notable ease and excitement in [the artist’s] mark-making. As paint is layered and removed, characters emerge slowly, and unpretentiously, resulting in a particular type of shimmering alchemy. As suggested in the title, Blessings, Onward acts as an invitation to be forward-thinking. To take stock of everything we are thankful for and to move onwards with gratitude.
Porous Identities | Group exhibition
Montréal | September 17 - October 29, 2022
In anticipation of Patel Brown opening a new location in Tiohtiá:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal, it seems relevant to reflect on how culture communicates, fragments, reinvents, and evolves. On a local scale, it's apparent that there is extraordinary potential for learning and exchange between the respective cultures of the two cities, where the gallery now has a foothold in Toronto, and now in Montreal. Looking closely at the practices of the gallery's artists, including the exhibiting artists of this inaugural show, we see this question of interconnection is at the heart of many of their reflections and artistic considerations.
Maria Hupfield | protocol break
Toronto | September 2 - October 8, 2022
The artworks in this exhibition were made or revisited in Toronto during our pandemic lockdown, a time of sadness and alienation for many of us. We were afraid, lonely, cut-off. Divided inside. Yearning for our roots and connections, the forest became a chair. Apartments became tents. Survival is passed down and remembered, thrown forward into the future.
Native art department international | woodland boogie woogie
Toronto | September 2 - October 8, 2022
The paintings—vortexes of flat colour and black lines that punctuate and intersect with curvilinear organic geometries—slowly reveal the vestiges of their inspiration: the forms of the widely recognizable Woodland School of art, also known as Legend painting, founded by the Anishinaabe artists Norval Morrisseau, Daphne Odjig, and Carl Ray, among others.
Winnie truong | herbaria
Toronto | July 30 - August 27, 2022
Winnie Truong's labour-intensive drawings have evolved into a distinct signature over the past ten years. What were once delicately weaved coifs became hairy, self-described wimmin creatures emerging from cattails. Within Herbaria, her latest solo exhibition with Patel Brown, new works that include large-scale dioramas and a stop-motion animation focuses on the unfettered femmes of the natural world and their disembodiment entrapped in white tape (“Synaptic Pruning”) or a web of their own making (“Weaving, Watching, Waiting”). She is beyond the viewer’s gaze, free from art historical baggage.
sarah letovsky | miles from home
Toronto | July 30 - August 27, 2022
Sarah Letovsky’s paintings are all of women at a particular stage of life - that time of life where one has to decide. Faced with questions of the future, of biology, of tradition. All of these questions are posed in tandem and in conflict with one’s sense of individuality and personal ambition. This dichotomy isn’t the same as the one presented to our fore-mothers, when options were more limited and to take the road less travelled bore a different kind of stigma. Yet, in our contemporary moment of multiplicities, it is easy to get mired by abundance. Born to an age of introspection, the faces of Letovsky’s women are marked with these questions.
luke painter | bauble bauble
Toronto | June 25 - July 23, 2022
Ignoring the artificial barriers that exist between fields in contemporary fine art, Luke Painter’s elegant works evoke fantastic, yet oddly familiar, spaces and subsequent narratives. Seemingly speculative in their pitch, the works draw us in through novel approaches to space and perspective.
Jenna faye powell | is this the right mountain?
Toronto | June 25 - July 23, 2022
In Jenna Faye Powell’s drawings—an eye spy of collected objects nestled within lush greenery—objects float, defying gravity. The surreal compositions lack context and provide insight: vignettes of emotion, permission to daydream, and a sense of foreboding. The drawings in “Is this the right mountain?” at Patel Brown Gallery invite narrative speculation, while the saturated reds and turquoises make it feel as if you’re looking through 3-D glasses at a movie theatre.
Kara springer | i / must be given words
Toronto | May 14 - June 18, 2022
Kara Springer’s solo exhibition, I / must be given words, seeks to find truth in the confounding of sensory experience and perception—suggesting that an unstable ground is perhaps the most productive one from which to begin making meaning. In the exhibition, high resolution scans of Springer’s skin are transformed into deep, oceanic blues, through a simple digital function that inverses the color spectrum.
Katherine melançon | night blossoms
Toronto | May 14 - June 18, 2022
In Night Blossoms, Montreal-based artist Katherine Melançon invites us to see nature as living and blooming everywhere, close to us, and never separated from culture or technology. The body of work presented here started more than ten years ago, when the artist lived in London, UK, and walked throughout the city scanning flowers and plants growing in private gardens.
Luis jacob | borderline cases: two in the bush
Toronto | March 26 - May 7, 2022
Luis Jacob’s newest solo exhibition Borderline Cases: Two in the Bush reveals the autobiography of line work, mark making, and gesture through a body of work that has coalesced over three decades. New spirograph works speak across time to paintings and sketches to trace the energy and aura of the work of art in all its boundless energy.
Howie tsui | a prologue to entombment
Toronto | March 26 - May 7, 2022
Howie Tsui’s A Prologue to Entombment examines the funerary ritual of returning bones to one’s hometown as an allegory for migrant experiences and diasporic yearning. This combines with explorations into the mounting suppression of voice as expressed through depictions of figures entombed within scholar rocks, referencing the Chinese practice of using cangues as a form of punishment and furthering Tsui’s ongoing strategies to destabilize canonized objects.
Shaheer zazai | a call home
Toronto | February 12 - March 19, 2022
A Call Home is both an examination of and an ode to the conscious and subconscious creation of cultural identity. The works in this exhibition also represent the artist's inversion of exclusive definitions of Afghan cultural identity framed through a strict binary located between the traditional and the contemporary.
laura dawe | Scrapartment
Toronto | January 15 - April 16, 2022
Laura Dawe’s work explodes from the covers of the traditional scrapbook and brings this methodological approach of meaning-making into the entirety of the gallery. In her Scrapartment we step into the pages of a living scrapbook, one that exudes extreme nostalgia, a simultaneity of bliss and anxiety, a calmness and compulsion.
nicHolas bierk | a distant light
Toronto | January 8 - February 5, 2022
Within A Distant Light are wanderings that span across glowing landscapes, resting bodies, and shadows lingering on walls. Nicholas Bierk considers them sketches — each compact canvas like a page in a journal - rendering itinerant, painterly explorations that move from place to place, from time to time, dispersed to dissolve any concise narrative or chronology.
re/flex | Group Exhibition
Toronto | January 8 - February 5, 2022
Re/flex revels in the malleability of lens-based media and its ability to reflect back the complexity of human and environmental experiences. Such explorations complicate the ways in which memories are considered nebulous, fleeting, and organic, while photographs are thought finite, bound, and even stagnant.