2024 rOGUE Gallery Programming
We are thrilled to announce this year’s lineup of rOGUE Gallery programming!!! We can’t wait to work alongside these talented local emerging artists to present some incredible exhibitions in 2024!
Be sure to mark your calendars and keep an eye out for upcoming rOGUE Gallery receptions and events. We are looking forward to welcoming our beloved community back into the space!
Kevin Melanson, Making Ends Meet
February 2 – March 16, 2024
These embroideries are meant to give viewers a look into the lives of practicing artists, who often receive payments for their work sporadically and have to maintain their day jobs to be able to afford to make art. Through hand-embroidery, I am exploring the relationship between the labour that goes into textile-based practices and the monetary worth that is associated with them. The making of art often becomes secondary to administrative work, because art is sometimes impossible to make without the monetary resources that the administrative work allows.
Luca Jesse Apel, Matka Las
March 29 – May 11, 2024
Matka Las (“Mother Woods”) is a brambled journey towards cultural reclamation, through the thickets of folklore, history, and fractured remnants of a mother tongue. As a trans child born to Polish immigrants, the artist grew up untethered, neither Polish, nor wholly Canadian, unable to reconcile joyous memories of Polish traditions with a country that considers his existence illegal. But once upon a time, Poland was pagan, ruled by anthropomorphic deities for whom gender may be fluid, unknown or irrelevant. In a series of wood carvings on pine slabs, Luca Jesse Apel reinterprets the mythic creatures of his childhood through a trans and queer lens, giving flesh to beings long without form, and reconnecting with a mother that may actually call him son.
Tessa Graham, Home as Place, Home as Pattern
May 24 – July 6, 2024
Geographically, physically and mentally our memories bring us places; within those places are patterns and routines that have embedded themselves in the search for familiarity, for home. They are inlaid in the colours, movements and sensations to which we become accustomed in our immediate surroundings. These photographs examine the relationship between memories in liminal places and my own continual grappling with what it means to be home in Newfoundland and Labrador. This series explores how engaging with the natural world through foraging is a process in and of itself. Memory and seasonal patterns can move thought processes through physical spaces, causing a shift in one’s sense of home; from a place you grew up to a place you choose to exist. It is to this fragile relationship with memory – between displacement and belonging – I feel drawn; it is here I feel the most at home.
Brian Amadi, FAWK YOUR WALLS
July 19 – August 31, 2024
This exhibition is a statement of resistance and a demand for recognition of the economic position of everyone below age 40 in our society today. Brian Amadi uses Acrylic paint to create a variety of artworks on denim Jackets. The subject of each painting varies as a signifier that there’s no group of people that can escape the current artificial asset scarcity that we are subjected to. Everyone from all walks of life suffers the brunt of the housing market.
Through his art practice, Brian Amadi has observed the rise in demand of mobile and functional art. It is a fact that the majority of people under 40 do not own property and may never do so until they are well past the age 50 – 55. Today, most people spend their ‘prime years’ renting property. Our lives are therefore subject to the goodwill of landlords. A goodwill that is itself slave to capitalist greed. The rise of homelessness indicates a valuation of infrastructure above human lives. This exhibition is an increasingly urgent rejection of the over inflated value of properties.
Evelyn Roitner, Place-Setting
September 13 – October 26, 2024
“Place-Setting” welcomes you to the table no matter the distance. Through illustrated functional ceramics arranged in a table setting, we see a story of friends gathering and how themes of human connection and distance are reflected in everyday tableware.
Violet Drake, Feeling Further
November 8 – December 14, 2024
Feeling Further is a multidisciplinary exhibition of prints, projection, and textile installation borne from digitally manipulated self-portraiture. This work is an exploration of both embodied and environmental metamorphosis and abstraction through a transsexual lens.