Mia Sandhu | Seeing You, Seeing Me, Seeing You
Montréal | November 5 - December 17, 2022

All elements in Mia Sandhu's drawings come together to produce a synaesthetic reaction — you can smell, hear, taste, and feel her staged environments. And you do so in the position of voyeur. As insinuated in the title, Seeing You, Seeing Me, Seeing You, your presence completes the transaction.

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.

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.

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.