Current Exhibition
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.
To read more about Kevin and his work, or view a virtual tour and photos of the exhibition, click here!
Upcoming Exhibitions
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.
Ignatius Baker, Belonging
January 31 – March 15, 2025
Belonging is a series of screen prints started during my residency at St. Michael’s Printshop in the fall of 2023. Belonging is about finding a sense of belonging through swimming with other trans people and allies in nature. Bodies of water bring together the trans and queer community, offering a place of healing, outside of the confining limits of the city. Away from the rigidity of institutions and their binaries, space is made to find easier company in each other. It is where I started to find confidence in my body after transition, a time when I felt vulnerable and like I no longer belonged. It is a space I returned to during the pandemic for calm and through which I connected to my queer and neurodiverse friends to find joy. I wanted to create a series that celebrates this love for pond swimming.
Past Exhibitions
2023
Kayla Williams: Goddess of the Sea
Monica Ila: I Dream In Shapes and Shadows
Christeen Francis: Love Under the Patriarchy – Portraits
Eastern Edge x Artforce NL: Wake Up Inspired
2022
Charlene Denief: Walking Away From Yourself
Shazia Ahmad: Three Years, Two Gardens, One Feeling
Alex Antle: Njiknam (My Younger Brother)
Mural Honouring Essential Workers
2021
Dion Kaszas | Nlaka’pamux Blackwork: Tattooing for Transformation, Healing, and Adornment
Bruno Vinhas | When it Stopped
100 Mini Houses; A Downtown Exploration | Molly Margaret
Lily Taylor | Funk Dance for Self Defence
2020
2019
Jude Benoit | Diary of a e’pite’ji’j: hypervigilant love
John MacCallum | Forever Young
Michelle Sylliboy | Komqwejwi’kasikl
Benjy Kean | Not as lost as you think
2018
Ashley Hemmings | SOUVENIR DOCUMENTS
Ethan Murphy | Where the Light Shines First
2017
Virginia Mitford | Alluvium: To Wash Against
Emily Pittman | A House of Another Colour