At Zalucky Contemporary, Together in Quiet Light brings together the quiet, multidisciplinary practices of Holly Chang, Isabelle Parson, Chiedza Pasipanodya, and Alexandre Pépin in a shared search for presence, tenderness, and interconnection. Presented as a Core Exhibition of the CONTACT Photography Festival, the show draws on the language of nature, memory, and material to reflect on how we come to know ourselves and others, often through what remains unsaid.
Installation view of Together in Quiet Light. Courtesy of Zalucky Contemporary
Isabelle Parsons’ photographic series documents abandoned greenhouses—once sites of growth and cultivation, now held in a state of suspended decay. Her images resist dramatization: instead, they linger on the quiet details: beams warped by time, fogged panes of glass, and the silhouettes of plants caught between life and dormancy.
Installation view with Isabelle Parson’s work 2024, archive prints, 36.75 x 24.75 inches each. Courtesy of Zalucky Contemporary
Light plays an integral role in Parsons’ work, not only as a photographic element but as a metaphor for attention itself—how we look, and what we choose to see. These spaces, both shielded and exposed, become mirrors for interior life, where the fragility of organic systems reflects the precarity of memory, emotion, and ecological time.
Isabelle Parson, Fern and dead twig, 2024, archive print, 36.75 x 24.75 inches, detail. Photo: Yehyun Lee
A similar sense of introspection anchors the work of Holly Chang, whose photographic and ceramic installations draw from a deeply personal narrative of loss, migration, and cultural dissonance. Created in a period of grief, her images, taken during solitary hikes in Quirpon Island and Banff, are embedded into handcrafted ceramic vessels, which double as shadow boxes. These objects act as containers of both image and affect. By placing landscape photography within the intimate scale of a sculptural form, Chang suggests that healing, like identity, is not linear but layered, and often shaped by quiet accumulations. Her work speaks of the labor of making visible what is often hidden, and the possibility of nature as a collaborator in that process.
Holly Chang, Transporting, 2022, earthenware ceramic, c-print, rare earth magnet, stainless steel chain, 30 x 8 x 1.5 inches, detail. Courtesy of Zalucky Contemporary
While Chang’s ceramics carry the imprint of emotional geography, Chiedza Pasipanodya’s sculptural series Mauuyu is rooted in ancestral memory and material translation. Drawing on the baobab tree of her native Zimbabwe—renowned for its longevity, nourishment, and resilience—Pasipanodya hand-builds clay forms that recall the tree’s fruit. These sculptures are fired using organic materials such as rose petals, plantain chips, and sawdust, which leave unpredictable, ephemeral traces on the surface. Installed in metal vessels, the fruits feel both ancient and contemporary, intimate and ceremonial. For Pasipanodya, sculpture becomes a way of recording absence, preserving memory, and exploring how diasporic identity is carried, not just through language or image, but through gesture, ritual, and touch.
Chiedza Pasipanodya, Mauuyu, 2025, raku ceramic, steel, 38 x 15 x 13 inches. Courtesy of Zalucky Contemporary
Alexandre Pépin turns to painting as a space for imagining alternative modes of connection between bodies, cosmologies, and histories. In his work Together in Quiet Light, two figures hold each other in a dense, symbolic landscape populated by celestial bodies, foliage, and echoes of Byzantine iconography. The painting, rich with spiritual and queer references, suggests an elsewhere beyond time and geography, where intimacy becomes its own form of sanctuary. Pépin’s ongoing interest in mysticism and queer modernism gives the work a layered sense of lineage, positioning tenderness not as escape, but as a strategy for survival and transcendence.
Alexandre Pépin, Together in Quiet Light, 2025, oil on canvas, 72 x 84 inches. Courtesy of Zalucky Contemporary
The exhibition unfolds through gestures of restraint, subtlety, and quiet intensity. It privileges the kind of meaning that does not announce itself but accumulates in layers—through the grain of a ceramic vessel, the mist on a greenhouse pane, the gesture of a painted hand reaching through foliage. It is a space in which stillness becomes active, where slowness is not lack but depth, and where the unsaid often speaks the loudest. In this way, Together in Quiet Light reminds us that the most profound transformations rarely arrive with grandeur. They happen in the margins, in the spaces we are taught to overlook, and in the ones, we must learn to hold open.
What binds these artists is not only a shared vocabulary of nature, memory, or intimacy, but a deeper sensibility, a reverence for the labor of attention, and for the fragile, persistent work of being in relation. Their practices circle around acts of reckoning: with personal grief and inherited histories, with cultural displacement and bodily memory, with the longing for connection in a fragmented world. Together in Quiet Light proposes that paying attention, truly and slowly, with intention, is itself a radical act. In moments of shared vulnerability, new forms of presence can take root: presence that is not permanence, but as touch, as breath, as light briefly held—a radical act.
Yehyun Lee
*Exhibition information: Together in Quiet Light / Isabelle Parson, Holly Chang, Chiedza Pasipanodya, Alexandre Pépin, April 5 – May 24, 2025, Zalucky Contemporary, 3044 Dundas Street W. Toronto. Gallery hours: Thursday to Saturday, 12 – 5 pm or by appointment.