Everything We Know II

2019

spray paint on board

26" x 18"

Framed

Courtesy of Dianna Witte Gallery and the artist

Mixing traditional painting techniques with spray paint, tape, stencils, and other materials, Ric Santon navigates the spaces between abstraction and representation. His artwork attempts to describe the foggy feeling and hazy memory of an elusive moment. He seeks out the poetry in the patterns of nature, endeavouring to make visible things that would otherwise remain unseen. Santon is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design University. His practice includes painting, photography, and video work.

Grocery Run

2020

acrylic on panel

10" x 8"

Courtesy of Mark Christoper Gallery and the artist

Yi-Shuan Lee is a Taiwanese-Canadian artist whose art practice includes painting, sculpture and film. His artwork features a play on odd and surreal narratives that are based on his life story, while revealing the lives of the Taiwanese youth of today. He acknowledges their struggle to outlive the expectations set by the previous generation.

Caribou/Hare Test

2019

ballpoint pen on paper

11" x 11"

Framed by Akau

Courtesy of MKG127 and the artist

The Caribou/hare coin collage started out as an idea and challenge: Adams wanted to see if the images on coins could be cut in such a way that the animal designs would align, thus creating a fictional creature, while also having the outside edges of each coin like overlapping circles.

Shroud (uncanny floral hand 2)

2019

ink on paper

8.5" x 7.75"

Framed

Courtesy of Norberg Hall and the artist

Marigold Santos was born in the Philippines and immigrated with her family to Canada in 1988. She pursues an inter-disciplinary art practice that examines lived experience and storytelling, presented within the realm of the otherworldly. Her work explores self-hood and identity that embraces multiplicity, fragmentation and empowerment, as informed by experiences of movement and migration.

Token (Dutch Pot)

2018

photo-based gel transfer on archival paper

7" x 10" edition of 3

Framed by Superframe

Courtesy of Georgia Scherman Projects and the artist

Token is drawn from a series examining selected objects that were transported from various Caribbean geographies. Under the artist’s lens, this cherished Dutch pot appears to glow from within, warmed by everyday use over an untold number of years. Having been gathered, moved, and re-presented beyond the domestic spaces of its belonging, Token is an intimate reminder of the places we come from. Testifying to histories of movement and relocation, the possession becomes a powerful activator of memory, transporting viewers to realms of longing, desire, and nostalgia for tangible pieces of home.

Sandra Brewster’s community-based art practice centres a Black presence located in Canada. Her Guyanese heritage makes her keenly attuned to the experience of people of Caribbean descent and their ongoing relationships with ‘back home’.

Tiger

2020

oil on panel

12" x 16"

Framed

Courtesy of Norberg Hall and the artist

Corri-Lynn Tetz focusses on the female figure as a way to explore identity, subjectivity, sensation and desire. Working from personal archives, fashion photography, film and pornography, she experiments with how images and meaning are transformed through painting, and how this process disrupts notions of the gaze and re-imagines pictorial space.

Griffith Observatory, Study

2021

cotton and linen

12" x 12"

Framed

Courtesy of the artist

Adrienna Matzeg's practice is focused around nostalgia. She uses a combination of analog and digital processes to create her work, and is drawn to the narrative quality that both photography and textiles possess. Her current work reflects on our relationship with travel.

Still Life with Pear, Grapes and Apples

2021

oil on linen

12" x 14"

Framed by Superframe

Courtesy of Projet Pangée and the artist

Darby Milbrath's expressionist paintings are informed by her memories of innocence and her experience. Originally from Victoria, BC, Milbrath holds a diploma from the School of Contemporary Dancers in affiliation with The University of Winnipeg. Her work as a dancer comes alive in her visual art practice, lending her paintings a sense of movement and intrepidity. Confessional in nature, Milbrath’s work reveals cryptic details of her childhood, dreams, memories, mystic visions, failed love affairs and private life. Currently based in Toronto, Milbrath has exhibited in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Yesterday's Growth

2021

gouache on paper

15" x 13"

Framed by Akau

Courtesy of the artist

This portrait embodies a transformation Jega Delisca experienced during the summer of 2020. With major anxieties about his future, the loss of close friends due to the pandemic, and after months of being inside buried in grief and self-doubt, Delisca ventured out to a local trail and unexpectedly felt a profound sense of peace. He has always found overgrowth and foliage comforting, but in that moment he also realized the worst had already happened, and that he had survived. This revelation gave Delisca the ability to take back control from fear, and actively participate in his life once more. 

A lucky penny

2021

oil and acrylic on panel

8" x 8"

Framed by Akau

Courtesy of the artist

Raoul Olou is a multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on home, belonging, and archiving the mundane. Recently, Olou was awarded the Mayor Purchased Award from the city of Toronto, at the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair. His work has been supported by the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council. He lives and works in Toronto.

Eternal Recurrence

2020

oil on canvas

36" x 36"

Courtesy of Sivarulrasa Gallery and the artist

Caroline Ji was born in Xuzhou, China, and currently lives and works in Toronto. She is a self-taught artist with a previous background in engineering. Her current body of work explores solitude and introversion, taking up the figure and the still life as her subjects. Inspired by life, memory, and the people around her, Ji’s painterly narrative is told through mood and atmosphere. Being both Canadian and Chinese, Ji explores an ambiguous understanding of cultural identity . Ji’s paintings are held in private collections across Canada, the United States, and Europe.

the flaneur

2019

mixed media on canvas

30" x 24"

Courtesy of Patel Brown and the artist

With its expressive use of line and gesture—and near-hallucinogenic play of colour and texture—Tessar Lo’s the flaneur conveys the frenetic energy of movement through contemporary city streets. Combining abstracted and representational elements, the work speaks to the dynamic interfacing of memory and experience. Marking the surface of the canvas with surreal visions and symbols, including the appearance of seemingly-disembodied hands and feet, Lo quickens the sense of being caught up by a fleeting moment in time.

Lo’s work has been exhibited in local venues, as well as internationally through the United States, France, the Netherlands, Spain and China. He is currently based in Toronto.

I'll Hide in the Pines

2021

oil, gesso, acrylic and paper on burlap

20" x 16"

Framed by Akau

Courtesy of Galerie Nicolas Robert and the artist

Using archives and image databases, James Gardner’s practice considers the ways in which images can be linked with cognitive processes, examining how the function of images help us build our subjectivities. Gardner paints in order to explore the connection between image and agency, investigating the image’s innate ability to manifest new forms of knowledge and experience. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, Gardner earned his MFA at Concordia University, and currently lives and works in Montreal.

Every Concavity Now Looked Convex

2020

ink on paper

12.5" x 14.75"

Framed by Akau

Courtesy of VivianeArt and the artist

Tyler Bright Hilton makes narrative drawings and etchings that explore themes of identity, personal accountability and bodily anxiety. The work blends unpredictable imagery and moods, shifting from being earnest to ironic and aesthetic to grotesque.

Polar Bear Chasing Seal

2019

coloured pencil and ink on paper

40" x 28.75"

Framed by Superframe

Courtesy of Feheley Fine Arts

Born in 1962, Kinngait-based artist Quvianaqtuk Pudlat only began his artistic career in 2017 and has already taken the art world by storm with his dynamic drawings. As a hunter and admirer of his natural environment, he devotes much of his time to observing animals on the land and sea. Pudlat notably spends time fishing and bird watching by his cabin located 25 miles away from Kinngait. There, he keeps a watchful eye on the animals’ behaviour and movements which he then translates into his artistic work.

I've Made a Place for Us, Yours forever, Lily

2020

chromogenic print

16.75" x 37" Edition of 5

Framed by Akau

Courtesy of the artist

Dianne Davis is a Niagara born, Toronto-based visual artist working in photography. She has had solo exhibitions at Angell Gallery, Harbourfront Centre and The Department of Canadian Heritage. Her work has been featured in numerous group shows in the United States and Canada, including Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography and Tom Thomson Art Gallery.

The promise of hope

2020

plaster, watercolour, synthetic turf on wood pane

24" x 24"

Courtesy of Bradley Ertaskiran and the artist

Conveying a visual message that seems to oscillate between faith and despair, The Promise of Hope captures the sentiment of our urgent historical moment. Fabricated from plaster, painted with watercolour and formed into letters arranged on synthetic green turf, Joseph Tisiga’s smoked-out cigarette butts appear stunningly realistic.

Tisiga creates artistic narratives that are built on a conflation of mythical and mundane forces. The urge to respond to the “feeling of being a hapless bystander,” Tisiga wrote in 2017, is the impetus for his practice as an artist, which seeks to, “speak back to conditions of reality where there is no single identifiable person or cause to hold accountable.”

Joseph Tisiga is a multidisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon social and cultural inheritance, and the factors contributing to constructions of identity: community, family, and nationality, alongside history and memory. Tisiga is a member of the Kaska Dene First Nation, and was named a REVEAL Indigenous Art Award winner in 2017.

Worst Person Ever

2019

acrylic, ink and coloured pencil on paper

14" x 17"

Framed

Courtesy of Cooper Cole and the artist

Walter Scott’s comic series, Wendy, chronicles the continuing misadventures of a young artist in a satirical version of the contemporary art world. Scott’s sculptures, drawings, and installations slip between reality and fiction, reflecting on the context and anxieties of cultural production, through both autobiographical elements and material self-awareness.

Untitled (from Blue Masks Series)

2021

embroidery, floss and fabric on found photograph

6.25" x 9.75"

Framed by Akau

Courtesy of Paul Petro Contemporary Art and the artist

Janet Morton has been adding hand-embroidered elements to found photographs for the past 20 years. During 2020, she began the Blue Mask Series in response to the adjusted reality of learning to read only part of a face. This group portrait of a “salesmen banquet” was taken in Hamilton, Ontario in 1945 and includes Morton’s paternal grandfather. Many of these men had recently returned from fighting in Europe. As Morton worked on this photograph, she found the Covid advertising phrase adopted by her bank repeating in her mind, “Standing Together, by Standing Apart”.

Janet Morton has been exhibiting across Canada and internationally since 1992. Her award-winning practice playfully and critically examines our relationship to the natural world and everyday objects. With equal measures of empathy and absurdity, Morton combines the stereotypically domestic techniques of knitting and sewing with the use of reclaimed materials. In so doing, she explores issues of consumption, value and time.

Ghost in the Machine

2020

acrylic on canvas

32" x 24"

Framed

Courtesy of Michael Gibson Gallery and the artist

Jonathan Forrest’s recent paintings follow his unique technique of pulling and scraping thin layers of paint across a canvas, and repeating the process until something emerges. He reacts to each stage, intuitively responding to what is happening with the colours, shapes and textures. There is a collage-like feeling to the paintings, but also a sense of discovery and play.  His painting combines luminous thin layers with chunks of solid colour, ridges, edges and licks of paint that skip, creating a luscious painterly experience.

El Rosario - Mariposa XI

2020

chromogenic print

36" x 30" edition of 4

Framed by Akau

Courtesy of the artist

Brendan George Ko is a visual storyteller who works in photography, video, installation, text, and sound. His work is about conveying a sense of experience through storytelling. Ko earned his BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, and he later studied video and sound art in the masters of visual arts program at the University of Toronto. Ko’s work has been featured in numerous events and exhibitions such as the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward and Hey! Hot Shot in New York City. Originally from Toronto, Ko has lived in New Mexico, Texas, and Hawai’i.

No Land

2021

archival pigment print

27" x 41.5 edition of 3

Framed by Akau

Courtesy of Christina Parker Gallery and the artist

No Land is drawn from a photographic series about relocation and the unknown. This series, titled From The Lion’s Den, stems from a residency Will Gill participated in at Fogo Island Arts, and follows an unidentified trio in their journey to start over. The photographs were shot on the open ocean as well as in and around a cove called Lion’s Den, in a punt handmade on the island by Barr’d Islands boat-builder Frank Combden. Lion’s Den is a sheltered cove which was once home to a community of approximately 50 people who voluntarily resettled in the 1950s.

Moon Reflection

2020

linocut print on paper

7" x 5.5" edition of 10

Framed by Akau

Courtesy of United Contemporary and the artist

Moon Reflection is composed of two separate linocut images from the artist's series Architecture of Music. Through the printing process, the artist finds a match between the two images, often by accident. In this work, the overlaid images provide a rich sense of depth, texture, and atmospheric light.