Salon | Group Exhibition
Toronto | 30 November – 21 December 2024

Patel Brown Toronto is excited to present its year-end exhibition. The Salon group exhibition features a selection of works by gallery artists, collaborators, and friends.

Surabhi Ghosh | By chance, choice, plan or force
Montréal | 23 November – 21 December 2024

For her first solo exhibition with Patel Brown, Surabhi Ghosh presents a network of five lyrical works illustrating her long-standing dedication to incremental, monochromatic patterns that challenge our perception and emphasize the precarity of the systems that surround us. Working with principles of weight, volume, and density, the artist forms a body of site-responsive installations that explore the pliability of socially-determined borders and hierarchies. Applying these forces into simple gestures, Ghosh ushers an idiosyncratic metaphysics into the gallery space. In so doing, her versatile patterns offer audiences concurrent avenues for interpretation and calls them in to participate.

ISABEL OKORO | COLOUR AND FEEL
Toronto | 19 October - 23 November 2024

Colour and Feel examines the interplay between colour and emotion by presenting photographs and paintings through a monochromatic lens to explore how each hue may alter our emotional perception of the image. This series also considers the reciprocal influence of our own emotional state on the meanings we ascribe to these colours. The work invites a simple question: does colour influence how we interpret emotion, or does our emotion influence how we see colour?

MARIA HUpfield | MAshkiki is movement
Toronto | 19 October - 23 November 2024

Hupfield’s vision in the Mashkiki collection, rooted in the land and extending through the body and movement, challenges and inspires new ways of thinking about Indigenous fashion. Mashkiki is Movement transcends a typical fashion collection, evolving into a sculptural reflection on the deep relationship between Indigenous designers, the land, and space. Hupfield uses fashion not only as a form of visual expression but as a vessel for storytelling, community, communication, and the body’s profound connection to the land.

Winnie Truong & Shanie Tomassini | As Above, so Below
Montréal | 10 October - 16 November 2024

When it comes to the natural world, a focal point for both artists, change takes the shape of devastation, one accelerated by human crowding and the fatal negligence of the few who stand wobbling at its top. It requires denial or real acceptance to continue making art under the psychic duress of that reality. Truong and Tomassini are noble practitioners of the latter. While their works evince beauty, they also manifest gloom; and it is in the site of their imagination, and in the obvious force of it for both of them, where opposites are reconciled and get translated into something singular.

Julie Moon | Flourish
Toronto | 14 September - 12 October 2024

Moon’s decorative vocabulary seduces the viewer. There are equal citations of the Memphis Group, Mattise, Bauhaus, and Art Deco, as well as ancient civilizations. An art historical journey takes place, but rather than the oft-cited elements of art history—mainly, the compositions—Moon focuses on the details of these periods. The borders, floral patterns, and colours. Moon collects the fragments of art history, delegated to the definition of “decorative” or “ornamental,” and makes it the focus. In doing so, Moon re-frames the eye and prioritizes the overlooked, the feminine and the non-Western art canon.

Kim Dorland | Nothing is good anymore Toronto | 14 September - 12 October 2024

Patel Brown Toronto is proud to present a solo exhibition of Kim Dorland’s newest body of work reflecting on grief, Dorland shares:

Grief is a feeling more than a thing. It’s big and heavy, immersive and without colour, just shades of black. But there is beauty at the edges of these shades of black, beauty at the edges of everything, even grief.

Luke Painter | Moving Images
Montréal | 29 August - 5 October 2024

In Moving Images Luke Painter continues his ongoing practice of demystifying, while simultaneously exploiting, the mysterious allure of images. With direct reference to both the technical mechanisms of moving image production and his own feelings about working from found images, Painter presents a series of compositions –found, altered, and reconstructed– that draw from the tropes of film, theatre, fashion, and animation.

It comes to me in waves | Group Exhibition
Toronto | 1 August - 7 September 2024

It comes to me in waves explores the landscape of memory through material languages of artists whose practices engage in translations of remembrance. Within the exhibition, themes of selfhood, national and diasporic identities, ancestry, and intergenerationality come to the fore, weaving the viewer into a tapestry of intricate and interlinked histories that illuminate the richness and potency of collective and individual memories.

Ernesto Cabral De Luna, Delali Cofie, Sukiana Kubba, Rajni Perera, Nep Sidhu, and Kendra Yee.

Curated by Sayem khan

A Nearly Tangible Fiction | Group Exhibition
Montréal | 11 July – 17 August 2024

While the first exhibition suggested a game of absence and fragments, this second proposal, co-curated by Roxanne Arsenault and Joséphine Rivard, focuses instead on the effects of presence and corporeality. Une fiction presque tangible / A Nearly Tangible Fiction explores the representation of a painted, drawn, or sculpted self through mythologized personal stories.

Olga Abeleva, Malik McKoy, Mégane Voghell, Ayam Yaldo, Frances Adair Mckenzie, and Muriel Ahmarani Jaouich.

CURATED BY JOSÉPHINE RIVARD and ROXANNE ARSENAULT

LAÏLA MESTARI | PORTRAITS ET CONTENANTS
Toronto | 20 June - 27 July 2024

In Portraits et Contenants, Mestari chronicles a complex narrative through works that combine multiple references in a collage-like manner; whether through drawing, textiles, or video, Mestari’s practice relies on a process in which groups of elements are juxtaposed, superimposed and amalgamated to form auto-ethnographic works that reflect her personal and cultural history.

JESSICA CAMPBELL & HEATHER RULE | HOMEBODIES
Toronto | 20 June - 27 July 2024

If you’re looking for an exhibition that subscribes to a hierarchy of material (so that you can easily tell what is important), you should look elsewhere. Here you will unfortunately be limited to the captivating idiosyncratic characteristics of handcrafted objects that use both natural and man-made, household materials, each assembling around their own systems of language. In the case of Rule’s sculptures, this comprises a highly personal vocabulary of resonant images that tell stories that, while recognizable, are not entirely legible to outsiders. In the case of Campbell’s wall works, the language is iconographic and pictorial, and equally rich with personal and historical detail.

AN ALMOST DISTANT THING | Group Exhibition
Montréal | 6 June – 6 July 2024

Une chose quasi distante / An Almost Distant Thing brings together different works around the idea of the fragment, collecting, and contemplation. In the eloquent absence of closeness, in the gathering of memories, and in selected observations of the incomplete and the notional, the six artists in this exhibition offer a few examples of their winding, desired, and subjective reality.

Émilie Allard, B. Brookbank, Maya Fuhr, Karen Kraven, Maddie McNeely, and Alberto Porro.

CURATed by JOSÉPHINE RIVARD ET ROXANNE ARSENAULT

RAÚL AGUILAR CANELA | SMART LIKE A SUN
Toronto | 16 May - 15 June 2024

Smart like a sun is a collection of abstract drawings situated in the emergence of new domesticity practices as a contemporary condition of living at the turn of post-pandemic times matching a 2024 solar eclipse momentum. 

ANIQUE JORDAN | UNDERBELLY
Toronto | 16 May - 15 June 2024

Decolonization asks us to employ different tactics, methodologies and approaches to undo the so-called finitude and linearity that colonialism insisted and insists upon. Colonialism violently states, “there is only one world, there is only one time, only one direction.” Anique Jordan’s refusal to accept this worldview is why she invites us to the Underbelly and develops what I am calling a decolonial grammar of other worlds. 

KYLE ALDEN MARTENS | SPUN THROUGH THE HEEL
Montréal | 25 April – 1 June 2024

Kyle Alden Martens’ first solo exhibition with Patel Brown presents a boudoir of seductive forms and textures […]. With a queer-tinted sense of artifice, Martens works intimately with leather, silk, wood, jewellery, and other materials. His work speaks to the perennial quest to “fit in” and the universal desire to find a place – metaphorical and literal – for oneself.

BRENDAN GEORGE KO | THE HAUNTED LANDSCAPE: CHAPTER ONE
Toronto | 28 March - 11 May 2024

Language fails us, often. Its limiting nature sets boundaries that stifle attempts at sharing felt experiences and sensations. And so there is a challenge in being bound to language to translate a body of work that casts exactly that as its primary subject: a feeling. Many will know it well. It is referred to as the uncanny, the enchanted, a haunting, the sublime; often, for lack of better words, it has been said to send a shiver down the spine or to make hair stand on its end. It is an absence so potent that it is present. 

ERODING TERRITORY | Group Exhibition
Toronto | 28 March - 11 May 2024

The artists featured in this exhibition dismantle colonial structures of landscape by reclaiming a geological agency that allows them to dive into the sediments and layers of their diasporic identities—to dive into a “terra” with multiple spaces, undercurrents, and temporalities.

Alberta Whittle, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, Christina Leslie, Farah Salem, Kara Springer, Marigold Santos, Martha Atienza, Nep Sidhu and Sebastian Maquieira.

CURATED BY CECILIA GONZÁLEZ GODINO 

SHARY BOYLE | VESSELLING
Montréal | 29 February – 20 April 2024

Following a touring exhibition titled Outside the Palace of Me circulated by the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, Vesselling is Shary Boyle’s first solo exhibition with Patel Brown. With a diverse array of new works that include wall pieces and sculptures, this exhibition invites the viewer into Boyle’s exploratory cosmos, one populated by figures seemingly pulled from a wonderfully strange dream.

Dominique Sirois | Meridian Liturgy for Travelers
Toronto | 24 February - 23 March 2024

Dominique Sirois’s sculptural practice constantly ebbs and flows between languages, making works that become metaphors. She enmeshes nature, mysticism, creatures, and humans; she creates new vocabulary out of visual languages that are deemed opposite, such as Eastern and Western aesthetics, or industrial and organic forms.

CELIA PERRIN SIDAROUS | OUR DUST
Toronto | 24 February - 23 March 2024

The gesture of taking apart to return together again is customary in your work, but one you had not taken to your family archive. How can re-assemblage make your ephemeral archeological? You could compose genealogy by ennobling the still life: it’s what you call an ethics for living, or an ethics for existing. You could exalt ritual, the objects that form the very basis of life. You could create containers to confine voids—vessels whose surfaces and orifices mirror each other (when one of them overflows, its flow fountain-like, propelled from within, as if with a pulsing core, against gravity, palpitates, then gushes, you remind me that a still life is never still), vessels whose clay still breathes. The vessel becomes visceral, earth skin and skin earth, clay caressed continuous with flesh.

Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka | susceptibility to gravity
Montréal | 18 January - 24 February 2024

Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka intertwines motifs from her cultural heritage with conceptual and thematic elements from nature to create works that map out changes that move people, society, and the land. Her two- and three-dimensional work highlights the expressive quality of washi, a Japanese handcrafted paper that originated in the seventh century and is permeated with the characteristics of the people who make it, the specificities of the water that shapes it, and the history in which it is inscribed. Through ink printing techniques and the use of natural dyes such as kakishibu, a Japanese dye derived from persimmons, Hatanaka creates colourful compositions imbued with a sensitive relationship to nature. Notably, she makes paper clothes that is meant to be worn and is crafted according to the traditional process of kamiko, in which konnyaku starch is added to washi, softening the material enough for it to be sewn. Light and translucent, the paper appears fragile but is surprisingly strong.

Mia Sandhu | Mourning Glory
Toronto | 13 January - 17 February 2024

Mia Sandhu's third solo exhibition with Patel Brown takes on the semblance of a funerary installation akin to a vigil. Punctuated by paper-based, funerary-floral arrangements, this solemn scene is sharply contrasted by brazenly nude figures in states of mourning. Those unfamiliar with Sandhu's work might find the presence of these shrouded, nude women surprising in this reverential setting. For those acquainted with the artist's recent projects, Mourning Glory appears as another chapter in their complex realities—realities that now encompass the seemingly insurmountable challenge of processing loss. Crucial to the complexity of these topics, Sandhu also taps into the taboo subject of ambivalence, whether as a coping mechanism or actual apathy, when it comes to grief.