The Inaugural Wall exhibition frames sculptural practice within a moment of institutional renewal, treating the wall as an active structural and conceptual element rather than a neutral backdrop. The exhibition brings together works with divergent material and formal approaches, rejecting a unified narrative of sculpture in favour of a plural field where scale, tactility, and spatial relation function as critical strategies. By emphasizing surface and proximity, the exhibition shifts attention away from sculptural monumentality toward processes of encounter. Sculpture is presented here not as a fixed category, but as a mutable discourse formed through ongoing arbitration among material durability, conceptual openness, and institutional context.
Installation view at the opening reception
Elizabeth Merei’s Silhouette distils the human figure into a continuous, upward-pressing form, where mass and void are calibrated with restraint. Carved in Italian marble, the sculpture rejects anatomical specificity in favour of a compressed corporeality: the torso twists subtly, shoulders and hips implied rather than visually declared, producing a tension between weight and lift. The polished surface absorbs light softly, smoothing transitions between planes and emphasizing the work’s internal rhythm rather than its outline. Emotionally, the piece registers as insistent. Its attenuated posture suggests vulnerability without fragility, as if the figure is both gathering itself and resisting collapse. The effect is intimate, inviting a slowed, bodily response from the viewer, who encounters the sculpture less as an image to be read than as a presence to be felt.
Elizabeth Merei, Silhouette, Italian marble, granite
Karen Stoskopf Harding’s Great Fertility Goddesses with Talisman Pouch & Pomegranate approaches fertility as a constructed and ritualized framework rather than a symbolic abstraction. Executed in encaustic, the vertically aligned heads adopt a frontal, mask-like presentation that suspends expression and emphasizes endurance and invocation. The chromatic contrast between the upper green form and the lower red form introduces a cyclical logic while the suspended talisman and pomegranate function as material signifiers of offering and embodied knowledge. Ornamentation and appendage extend the work spatially, positioning the interval between the two forms as an active site of meaning. The emotional effect is one of restrained gravity because the work elicits contemplation rather than empathy, confronting the viewer with fertility as a condition structured by obligation, ritual weight, and psychological intensity rather than generative ease.
Karen Stoskopf Harding, Great Fertility Goddesses with Talisman Pouch & Pomegranate, encaustic, mixed media
Dina Torrans’s Heirloom #11 – Wish mobilizes the motif of the wing as both structure and metaphor, assembling layered copper elements into a form that suggests movement while remaining fixed in place. The patinated surfaces register time through variation in tone, producing a stratified texture that evokes accumulation. The wing’s curvature directs the viewer’s gaze downward toward the suspended object, which interrupts the expectation of uplift with a counterweight that is materially grounded. Formally, the work stages a tension between expansion and restraint while emotionally, it operates in a minor key: the piece evokes longing without spectacle, articulating “wish” not as triumph but as a deliberation between desire and the weight of what is carried forward.
Dina Torrans, Heirloom #11 – Wish, bronze, patina
I strongly recommend experiencing this exhibition in person, as the formal and material qualities of its works are most effectively apprehended firsthand. The nuanced display of light and surface texture, coupled with the deliberate manipulation of scale, produces perceptual effects that are inevitably flattened in photographic or digital reproductions. Moreover, the spatial relationships between the works create a rhythm and tension that affect the aesthetic experience.
Kaya Meziane
Images are courtesy of the Canadian Sculpture Centre
*Exhibition information: The Inaugural Wall / Group Show, November 8, 2025 – January 29, 2026, Canadian Sculpture Centre, 260 Spadina Avenue, Ste 500, 5th floor, Toronto. Gallery hours: Tue – Fri 12 – 5 pm.