Lindsay Montgomery | bugbear
Toronto | 17 November - 23 December 2023

In Bugbear, Lindsay Montgomery expertly draws on a visual language that she has been refining for the last two decades. Montgomery’s ceramic forms and the figurative and spatial elements of their narrative compositions are informed by close study of Medieval illuminated manuscripts and Renaissance decorative art and paintings, while the themes and issues present in her work mirror the complexities of our tumultuous contemporary moment.

Michael Dumontier & Neil Farber | Vulnerability in transition
Toronto | 17 November - 23 December 2023

In his 2008 memoir Born Standing Up, wild and crazy comedian Steve Martin recalls of his early stand-up: “I was linking the unlinkable, blending economy and extravagance, non-sequiturs with the conventional.” Surveying the range of works in Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber’s exhibition Vulnerability in transition, it’s apparent how the absurdity that underlies Martin’s comedy has influenced these artistic partners since their formative days in the late 1990s as co-founding members of Winnipeg’s ground-breaking Royal Art Lodge.

NATIVE ART DEPARTMENT INTERNATIONAL | HIGH MAGICK
Montréal | 16 November - 23 December 2023

In this new body of work, NADI shepards us towards a new set of discoveries. It is like we are witnessing the apparition of a presence telling us the hidden stories of those mountains, this land. They show a tension between an expansion and a contraction, maybe the reflection of two great minds trying not to be contained on a limited surface. Each of the paintings in the “Hidden Shaman” series represents an eye, a vision of the world that is sensitive to divine intervention, and at the same time very aware of the spiritual values they are creating.

Kim Dorland | is this it?
Montréal |  5 October - 11 November 2023

Kim Dorland’s art isn’t overtly political, but nowadays, how can we feel safe without taking a hard look at our society? By making everything appear suspect and restless, every sky is charged with doubt, every colour becomes meaningful. "Is This It?" is a deliberately open question with an ambiguous pictorial answer, leaving us unsure if it’s recounting what has happened, speculating on a possible ending, or simply drawing the first images of a worst case scenario. In the past, Kim Dorland demonstrated  a kind of fascination with the future, which is something he revives here, although now it is tinged with an uncomfortable yet healthy dose of solastalgia.

SHELLIE ZHANG | ELEMENTAL
Toronto | 14 September - 4 November, 2023

Home” is a recalcitrant dollhouse, a living sense that tails your every last action. 
Take stock of the missing element in your home. 
For lack of water, enjoy a cold bubble bath. 
For lack of fire, let the fumes rise from candle and Ovaltine. 
For lack of earth, plant a monkey puzzle tree in the middle of it. 
For lack of wood, straighten your spine and bark at the furniture. 
For lack of metal, let the handymen plume about your room in fishnet lacquers. 
Filial cannibalism, or: how we put each other out of our miseries when blood ties bind us all the way through. 
The arrangement of objects in space offers its support to your heroic journey homebound, as if what can always be transformed is the same as peace with one’s own fate.

Kim Dorland | A small digital print show
Toronto | 14 September - 4 November, 2023

Thematically A small digital print show resumes Dorland’s longstanding interest in the overlap of identity and place. His subject matter feels oddly still yet seems to emit a low-frequency buzz. A type of imperceptible energy. The deep-hum of something quietly percolating. These dualities point directly to the futility many feel living through our current climate crisis. There is so much to do and so little being done.

Shaheer Zazai | Allow me to Sow and See the Garden I Become
Montréal | 31 August - 1 October, 2023

As an Afghan-Canadian artist, Shaheer Zazai explores how culture and identity are constructed. In Allow me to Sow and See the Garden I Become, Zazai presents a new body of work in which he continues to reflect on how his country of origin is perceived. Afghanistan has long been associated with ongoing war and conflict, to the exclusion of all other possible facets of its culture. By focusing on the power of flowers and gardens, Zazai tries to activate the hope of transformation while allowing his studio to become a site for meditation and reparation.

Break It to Me Gently | Group Exhibition
Toronto | 4 August - 9 September, 2023

Break it To Me Gently invites you to explore feelings inspired by the hazy days of summer: nostalgia, joy, healing, and wonder. As we gently ease into fall, this exhibition encourages you to savour the remaining rays of sunshine and reflect on the season as it passes. 

Raúl Aguilar Canela, Leeay Aikawa, Vanessa Brown,
Nathan Eugene Carson, Patrick Cruz, Melissa Doherty, David R. Harper, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, Oreka James, Miao Xuan Liu, and Shellie Zhang.

Kendra Yee | Tip of the Tongue
Toronto | 22 June - 9 September, 2023

Meditations in clay and paint embody the fluidity of theatrical personas and mischievous entities: The Hero, The Joker, The Critter, The Magician, and most broadly, The Entertainer. As a garden that channels the thespian stage, Tip of the Tongue takes an introspective look into versions of our complex identities that exist both inwardly and outwardly. Yee shapes these explorations as a tongue twister, embracing the phenomenon of forgetting to retrieve a word from memory, keeping the curious gate ajar for the audience to enter.

Marigold Santos | the pace and rhythm of time, floating / ang tulin at kumpas ng oras, lumulutang
Toronto | June 22 - July 29, 2023

Santos recognizes her immigration from the Philippines as the departure point for her work. The artist reconfigures Philippine materiality, traditional sartorial elements, flora, and most stunningly, the formidable figure of the asuang (aswang), the medicine woman of pre-colonial Philippine society, who was demonized by the Spanish missionizing project in order to subdue her power. Along with her expansive repertoire of visual vocabularies, Santos mobilizes this extraordinary being to speak of the multiplicity and complexity of the diasporic condition.

Muriel Ahmarani Jaouich | Living Lineages
Montréal | May 25 - July 1, 2023

When you descend from people who were not supposed to survive, what do you make of/from/with your inheritance of their wounds? (. . .) Muriel Ahmarani Jaouich’s paintings are a vehicle for the unspoken, a vessel for connection and reclamation. (. . .) In them, her ancestors are emancipated, bathing in light, despite grief’s presence in these edenic, harmonious, sometimes flamboyant images.

rajni perera | THE VESSEL WITH TWO MOUTHS
Toronto | 12 May - 17 June 2023

The Vessel with Two Mouths places Perera within a research methodology that investigates her fascination with the unseen. The exhibition displays a non-linear progression of her practice that embodies the origins of her ancestry and linkages to Sri Lankan cultural and spiritual traditions. Influenced by a month-long residency in her home country of Sri Lanka with her daughter, this new body of work represents the artist’s longing for an ancestral home, and renegotiates her diasporic relationship to her heritage.

VANESSA BROWN | TWILIGHT FLOWERS
Montréal | 6 April - 20 May 2023

Akin to the Looney Tunes portal that seems to open ad infinitum, in Twilight Flowers, Vanessa Brown invites us into a generous meditation on surreality, vastness, and vulnerability through the multivalent symbol of the hole. Adapted from the larger exhibition That Other Hunger, presented in 2022 at the Richmond Art Gallery, Twilight Flowers is a material and thematic departure for Brown. Known for her large-scale steel sculptures, this new body of work nevertheless echoes her ethos for theatricality, sensuality and research-based precision. Here, smaller metal objects exist alongside a series of photo collage prints, and a singular poetic film. 

NICOLAS FLEMING | MORE OF A MUDROOM
Toronto | 9 March - 29 April, 2023

Mudrooms are transitional spaces between the outside world and home where one discards the traces of outdoors before entering domestic privacy. In Nicolas Fleming’s mudroom, however, the mud engulfs and traps the household. Fleming created A Mudroom at the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre [and] successively invited to contribute individual responses in A Mudroom, artists Patrick Cruz, Shellie Zhang, Élise Provencher, Ingrid Syage Tremblay, Celia Perrin Sidarous, GHY Cheung, Nicolas Grenier and The Mud Painters youth workshop. 

SURFACE TEMPERATURE | Group Exhibition Toronto | 9 March - 29 April, 2023

This fortuitous grouping of artists offers a relevant snapshot of how contemporary artists digest and challenge our understanding of being and creating. Collectively, these works take an interest in diverse, even, divergent themes, addressing immigration, decoration, productivism, capitalism, folklore, gender identity, architecture, intergenerational trauma, and mysticism, among others.

Ibrahim Abusitta, Winnie Truong, Shirin Fathi, Lindsay Montgomery, Muriel Ahmarani Jaouich, Alexa Hatanaka, Shannon Garden-Smith, Shellie Zhang, Michael Dumontier & Neil Farber, and
Jenna Faye Powell.

Lido Pimienta | THE FABRIC. THE ANGER. THE RIVER.
Montréal | 24 February - 1 April, 2023

As she grows, breathes and moves through the act of weaving several practices together, the work of Lido Pimiento feels increasingly inseparable in medium. The yearning timbre her singing voice offers and the poise and position of her sewing and painting hand is the same; they tell me that as transplants we look back. They affirm that immigrant practices manifest in a loop, not a line. As the sickness of the Western Colonial Construct shows its face to us all more than ever before, and its veneer of propaganda geared toward poor nations no longer holds up, what is a practice birthed by an immigrant? And what does it do?

Kyle Alden Martens, Dominique Sirois & Shanie Tomassini | Personal Allegories
Toronto | 14 January - 18 February 2023

We use allegories to make sense of universal concepts and personal matters, natural phenomena and everyday life. The artists featured in this exhibition use sculpture, performance and display to create forms of allegory, from the political to the intimate. They employ representation of the human form and references to the body to create narratives in which undercurrents of feminism, queerness, eco-anxiety and identity are palpable. While each of the artists have distinct stories to tell, this exhibition weaves together intersecting elements to bring forward new allegories infused with contemporary ideologies.

Fatine-Violette Sabiri and Raul Aguilar Canela | Loom
Montréal | 19 January - 18 February 2023

At first glance, this exhibition of works from Fatine-Violette Sabiri and Raul Aguilar Canela could be read as yet another sign of craft’s full reintegration into the contemporary art world – especially textile-based work, which has garnered a lot of attention recently. Both artists have certainly been developing object-oriented practices that exist outside of the specific codes of painting, print or photography, while also hinting at the complex histories of these mediums.

Shaya Ishaq | But there are new suns
Toronto | 14 January - 18 February 2023

Elegy for a matriarch whose spirit pulses through soil and rises with the sun, eternally. This is where words meet cloth. This is where the practice of weaving becomes the practice of mourning. This is where textile and text meet each other – a sculpture of colourful double cloth and arching coils, paired with bent wood and dark soil – as a lament for the dead. The matriarch is Ishaq’s grandmother who died in Uganda during the pandemic. When their funerary practice necessitated a quick burial that she could not attend, weaving was the way she could extend the period of mourning.

Camille Jodoin-Eng | Convergence at the Frog Pond
Toronto | 24 November - 23 December 2022

For the artist Camille Jodoin-Eng, the terrain of that world, of its feelings and curiosities, is the basis for her growing group of invented symbols. She dips into that world’s depths and out of intuition they emerge: some as simple as an oval or curved line; others, like the papier-mâché pieces on view at Convergence at the Frog Pond, more elaborate.