Category: FEATURES

The Red Head Gallery at 401 Richmond St, W is a relatively compact space, but for this show a surprising number of abstract paintings are on display. The works of the six artists are each hung one besides the other in turn, to surround the entire space. A major reason that so many paintings can be accommodated is that they cohere so well. And as their write-up states: “the works resonate through their common investment in colour, structure and the expressive potential of paint”. But these listed features are shared by such a variety of abstract painting that it hardly explains why this particular set of paintings fits together, why they resonate.

In one sense the artists selected one another after a process of showing at the common venue of the Carnegie Gallery, Hamilton, and most recently together at Joshua Farm Gallery, Oakville. They all hail from the Hamilton/Niagara region. They are peers who have each ‘had long-running practices’, as they put it. Several of them began their art educations in the late 1970s. That was a time when the mainstream was beginning to accept abstract art.

Installation view of Six Positions in Abstraction at Red Red Gallery. Courtesy of The Red Head Gallery

At the Ontario College of Art in the 1970s, for instance, a revolution of sorts took place when a power struggle among the faculty ultimately led to the overthrow of conservative traditional painting, to be replaced by the latest practices of the international art scene epitomised by the art of New York City. And so both Ian MacKay and Barry Coombs, who studied there at the end of the 1970s, were exposed to the celebrated abstract paintings of the expressionists, colour field painters and the post-minimalists. These movements epitomised the height of abstractionism in art. In other words, the six painters were part of the first generation who grew up with the grand abstract paintings at the end of the modernist era. It was the tradition they inherited.

Our six painters – Barry Coombs, Jody Joseph, Peter Kirkland, Janice Kovar, Ian Mackay and Marla Panko – have essentially kept faith with the modernist universalist agenda, that is, the view that art ought to concern itself with what is common to us all, notwithstanding the idealism and presumptions behind this view. As such there are no overt cultural or ethnic markers in their works. Their focus is exclusively on formal and emotional qualities using the medium of paint.  

So in this show we have the works of a collection of painters who have a common artistic outlook. As a result their works share an agenda in a very loose sense – the aim, roughly, of exploring the formal and emotional qualities that painting licenses, and which are distilled and highlighted by abstraction in particular. Let’s briefly look at each of them in turn.

Throughout her long career Panko has experimented and produced an enormous variety of work, from collages to sculpture. In this show we encounter her sparest, almost minimalist works consisting of bold linear shapes rendered in black-and-white. She masterfully highlights, with a few lines, the illusionistic quality of space rendered on a two-dimensional surface.

Marla Panko, Laocoön 2025, acrylic on wood, 36 x 36 inches

The two-dimensionality of painting is celebrated by Coombs and Mackay more literally. The works of both artists involve the division of the pictorial surface into shapes. The very act of doing this creates spatial illusion, but in this case the spotlight turns onto structure and colour themselves. For Coombs the division of the paintings’ surfaces is hard-edged, and consequently has a cerebral quality to it. His aim, he tells us, is to bring out the magical visual qualities at play in the mundane world, e.g., the way shadows are cast. And that he does wonderfully.

Barry Coombs, METER #1, 2026, acrylic on canvas,  48 x 36 inches

For Mackay, on the other hand, his looser rendering reflects a playfulness in his work. His paintings often sit on the edge of representationalism, in as much as some elements hint at the depiction of this or that object, or architectural detail perhaps. He has developed an assured touch that betrays a unquestionable mastery of abstraction.

Ian Mackay, Templum, 2026, oil on wood, 36 x 30 inches

The works of Joseph and Kovar emphasize the physicality of paint. Both celebrate the material surface and the seductive qualities of paint itself. Every painter has felt its seductiveness, has fallen in love with it. That is especially true of abstractionists. Joseph has spent a great deal of time working in Italy, and that has influenced the pallette and compositions of her paintings. Indeed, she tells me that as well as painting abstracts she has long had a practice of painting the Italian landscape, and luscious Cézannesque still-lives.

Jody Joseph, Montecastello, 2026, oil on canvas, 40 x 44 inches

The surfaces of Kovar’s paintings are truly mesmerizing. Using a combination of roughly blocked shapes and large gestural marks, within a limited pallette, Kovar’s surfaces sing. She sums up her approach as follows:  “I’m drawn to that liminal space—the tension, overlap, and quiet transition between the built and the natural.”

Janice Kovar, Threshold Blue, 2026, mixed media on cradled board, 30 x 30 inches

Finally, Kirkland’s images of organic shapes are not in fact derived from directly observing natural forms, as one might suspect. Rather, they are the result of ‘working the surface’ as he puts it. He layers and erases the paint in turn, sometimes scraping or sanding it. Emerging from this process are his magical ‘biomorphic forms’.

Peter Kirkland, “Painting 6/26 #1”, 2026, oil on wood, 40 x 30 inches

All of the painters in this show are modest in their ambition. Their works are neither cutting-edge nor candidates for display in the pavilions of the grand biennales, say. Nonetheless they are serious dedicated artists who have spent very many years immersed in their craft. And it shows. Abstractionism is a difficult genre to master. The competent abstractionist walks on the tightrope of producing compelling work, but always risks falling into the merely decorative. These are all compelling works. This show is a dazzling testament to the fact that the modernist tradition of abstraction is thriving, and has plenty of life in it.

Installation view of Six Positions in Abstraction at Red Red Gallery. Courtesy of The Red Head Gallery

Hugh Alcock

Images are courtesy of the artists.

*Exhibition information: Six Positions in Abstraction, August 5 – 22, 2026, Red Head Gallery, 401 Richmond  St W, #115, Toronto. Gallery hours: Wed – Sat 12 – 5 pm.

Sara Cwynar’s Baby Blue Benzo Beta does not create an alternate universe so much as reorganize the one we already live in. Sex, beauty, money, technology and power do not appear as abstract mechanisms operating behind contemporary life, but as blunt forces. Across Cwynar’s collaged images, screens, objects and words, the exhibition suggests that the systems governing our standards and desires have become so ordinary that we barely notice them anymore.

Cwynar makes them visible again.

The exhibition operates like an alphabet for contemporary life. Words and phrases drawn from popular online searches and Cwynar’s own browsing history become starting points for sprawling visual associations. Terms such as “disinformation,” “new woman,” “plastic,” “wrestle” and “youth” are translated into images, objects and cultural references. What initially appears arbitrary becomes revealing: our searches form an accidental archive of what preoccupies us, frightens us and, perhaps most importantly, what we have been taught to desire.

The alphabet is an especially fitting structure because alphabets teach us how to enter the world. In Baby Blue Benzo Beta, Cwynar reverses this process. Rather than teaching the neutral “A is for apple” alphabet of childhood, she asks what an apple might mean after centuries of accumulated religion, advertising, technology and popular culture.

“A” inevitably recalls another beginning: the apple of Adam and Eve. The reference positions Cwynar’s alphabet almost as a contemporary Genesis. The biblical apple introduces knowledge through the distinction between good and evil, establishing one of Western culture’s foundational binaries. Good makes sense because bad exists; innocence because corruption exists. Cwynar similarly builds meaning through contrast, exposing how the categories we inherit determine how we understand the world.

But Cwynar’s Genesis belongs to the age of mass media. Alongside biblical associations are guns, tuxedos, definitions, stock images and corporate imagery. If the Tree of Knowledge once promised an understanding of good and evil, contemporary knowledge arrives through Google searches, advertisements, archives and endlessly circulating images.

From A for apple, Cwynar moves to B for bunny. The bunny brings with its Playboy, sexuality, femininity and money. Repeated bunny figures appear alongside images of wealth and consumption, connecting sexual desirability to economic value. Some appear wrapped, others exposed, creating associations with availability, possession and ownership. The exhibition repeatedly asks: what is the relationship between desirability and ownership?

Women occupy the centre of this visual economy. Female wrestlers, supermodels, actresses and sex symbols such as Pamela Anderson and Marilyn Monroe populate the exhibition’s visual ontology. Yet, their power rarely frees them from the gaze surrounding them. Male figures are more readily associated with politics, authority, wealth and command, while women are repeatedly defined through youth, beauty, vulnerability and sexual availability.

The female wrestlers (who visualize “W” being for “Wrestle”) make this contradiction especially clear. Their bodies are strong, trained and capable, yet Cwynar selects images in which those same bodies become intimate spectacles: pinned down, entangled, exposed or rendered vulnerable for the viewer. Through the deliberate curation of their pictures, Cwynar demonstrates that even when a woman becomes powerful, an image can transform that power back into desirability.

A similar contradiction appears in Cwynar’s images of youthful femininity (ie. “Y” being for “Youth,” or “K” being for “Knowledge,” among many others). Pamela Anderson and other cultural icons exist within a world where the ideal woman must be innocent yet sexual, youthful yet mature, maternal yet childlike.

This tension extends into “H” for home, where domesticity and the nuclear family coexist with the images of bikinis, bodies and sex symbols of the exhibition. Woman appears simultaneously as mother and girl, caretaker and object of desire.

The “T” for time “Time” sharpens this critique. Clocks and references to youth suggest that women experience time differently within this economy of images. Male power is often imagined as something accumulated: money, authority and influence grow with age. Female value, by contrast, is repeatedly represented as something that expires.

Youth becomes capital. Beauty becomes maintenance.

Cars, women, fashion, houses and luxury objects therefore begin to occupy the same visual vocabulary. A gleaming automobile and an idealized female body appear almost interchangeable as status symbols: desirable objects whose value extends to the person capable of possessing them.

Capitalism promises freedom through choice. You can purchase the right clothes, drive the right car, modify the right body and assemble the right identity. Baby Blue Benzo Beta pushes that promise toward an uncomfortable question: if we are free to become whatever we want, how much of what we want has already been chosen for us?

Yet the exhibition never feels purely bleak. Its romantic soundtrack, saturated imagery and visual abundance are seductive. Cwynar understands why we want to look. Familiar celebrities, commodities and symbols dissolve into one another in a dreamlike visual puzzle, implicating viewers in the very culture they are being asked to question.

Her collage-like logic recalls Surrealism’s ability to create meaning by bringing unrelated objects together, but Cwynar’s unconscious belongs unmistakably to the twenty-first century. It is no longer only the private psyche being mapped, but the algorithm, the search history and the digital archive.

Our subconscious now leaves data behind; and data legitimizes knowledge.

By turning that data into an alphabet, Cwynar teaches us our ABCs again – not because we do not know the world, but because we may know it too well.

Sex. Beauty. Money. Technology. Power. Youth. Ownership.

These are not discoveries within Baby Blue Benzo Beta. They are the vocabulary through which contemporary life has already taught us to understand ourselves.

Cwynar simply makes us read it out loud.

Antonella Pecora Ruiz

Images: Sara Cwynar, Baby Blue Benzo Beta. The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto installation view, MOCA Toronto, 2026. Courtesy of the artist, Cooper Cole, Toronto, and The Approach, London. Photo: LF Documentation.

*Exhibition information: Sara Cwynar, Baby Blue Benzo Beta, May 15 – August 16, 2026, MOCA Toronto, 158 Sterling Rd., Toronto. Museum hours: Wed – Thurs 11 am – 5 pm, Fri 12 – 9 pm, Sat – Sun 10 am – 5 pm.

Interview with Daniel Nicholas Francisco Cardoso (DC) by Emese Krunak-Hajagos (EKH)

Daniel Nicholas Francisco Cardoso

EKH: You just opened The Artist Studio a few weeks ago on Wade Avenue. Where did you get the idea from?

DC: It really all began when the studio I was working out of (Open Studio at 401 Richmond) closed for renovations for a good part of the year. My colleagues and I essentially had nowhere else to go, and I soon came to realize how much studio space was needed in the city, especially space with specialized equipment and support for working artists. Additionally, the pandemic closed down several studio spaces in the city, and artists were left figuring it out on their own. I was also at a crossroads in my career. I had plans to do a Masters, but with the declining jobs and opportunities within the post-secondary world, I knew I had to pivot. This opportunity for a business came up, and with the support of my husband, Alejandro Rizzo Nervo Nieto, who is also a working artist, we decided to venture into owning a studio together, and supporting artists. Thus, The Artist Studio was born!

EKH: Could you please tell us about your background, your education, artistic career, teaching and as a studio owner and manager.

DC: I am a graduate from OCADU, with a BFA specialized in Printmaking. I am also one of the last people to take part in the Florence Off-Campus program from OCADU, in which I went through a year of self-directed studio practice in Florence, Italy. It was there that I began my work in studio management, when I volunteered at SRISA (Santa Reparata International School of Art) in exchange for studio access. This exchange was invaluable to my practice and to this day, the connections I made, and lessons I learned continue to influence me. 

After graduation, I began to work out of Open Studio – I started teaching classes on linocut and etching, as well as assisting artists in specific projects. Open Studio was instrumental in my career – their support and trust allowed me to grow as both an artist and educator. From the experience I gained there, I was able to get the job as a Teaching Assistant and later Class Assistant in the printmaking department of OCADU. Both these opportunities taught me a lot about studio management, teaching, and the kind of support artists need to grow their own careers. I now have years of experience under my belt in education and studio management and am confident I can run a studio.

My husband, Alejandro, brings the other side of the coin. He works for an art consulting firm, as well as an Editions and Archive Specialist for an established local artist. This experience has brought him knowledge in the backside of studio management and art organization. He brings with him years of experience in documentation, cataloguing, sales, and exhibitions.

Together, we carry all the skills and experience needed to run a space like The Artist Studio.

Alejandro (left) and Danny (right)

EKH: When I visited the studio, I was really impressed with its size, organized appearance and the various opportunities it can provide for artists. Could you please give us more details.

DC: Our space at 87 Wade is very accessible by transit, which was important for us. It also boasts a combined size of over 2400 square feet, which allows us to have multiple mediums and various equipment, as well as dedicated private spaces. We were able to renovate this unit into what it is now, thanks to family and community coming together. We are grateful for every single person that has had a hand in making this space possible. It truly takes a village, and we have an incredible group of friends that have supported us in this endeavour.

In terms of supporting artistic practice, we offer three main routes:

• First and foremost is affordable access to studio space with specialized equipment. Our goal is to provide access to multiple mediums/disciplines in one space, so artists don’t have to go to multiple studios to get their work done. We currently have access to a black and white photo darkroom (complete with two enlargers and all the equipment necessary), etching press (for printing etchings, linocuts, woodcuts, and more), an acid bath for copper plate etchings, and a washout unit and screen-printing tables. As we grow, we will be getting our own exposure unit to expand even further. 
• Secondly, we have a gallery in which members can submit to exhibit work. Keeping our members with an ongoing practice, and activating the space with new exhibitions that bring new collectors is a big goal for us.
• Finally, we provide professional services and professional development for artists. This includes workshops and residencies in which artists can learn new mediums within the space, as well as assisting artists in documentation, cataloguing, giclee reproductions, etc.… If there is a way to support an artist’s practice, we will make it happen!

EKH: On your website I also read that you provide many different memberships with access to studio facilities. How does it work?

DC: We have different tiers of access that accommodate every stage of an artist’s career and budget. Our dedicated room memberships come with a private space in which artists can permanently work out of. Currently, our small and medium-sized dedicated memberships are sold out. We have two of our Master memberships remaining, which come with a large room and access to the entire facilities. 
We also offer our shared memberships, in which artists have access to the main shared space and all facilities. These are our most affordable options that grant artists access to everything they’d need to create their work. In these tiers, we have an option with a year commitment, or a month-to-month basis, depending on the needs of the artist.

The membership tiers were set out this way so artists with any range of budget could still have access to studio space and equipment.

EKH: Besides the studio spaces you also organize exhibitions. Are the exhibiting artists also members of the Studio or is there a call for them?

DC: For our inaugural exhibition, we reached out to our direct network of artists, to help activate the space and bring a wide range of people into the studio. Going forward, our members will have first access to exhibition calls, before they go to the public. We also set out a certain number of slots per exhibition specifically for our members. We will continue to make public calls for exhibitions to ensure new artists and art lovers continue to discover us!

EKH: Your statement says “Build by Artists for Artists” – I love that. I think it states your commitment to the artist community in Toronto. What are your expectations, even dreams for the future?

DC: As working artists ourselves, my husband, Alejandro, and I know what the needs of this industry are, and we are both fully committed to help build the artistic community in Toronto. We dream of international collaborations with other studios (residencies and exchanges for mutual growth). We dream of participating in art fairs and being able to showcase our members’ work. I see this business growing into other locations and expanding the mediums and facilities we provide! All in all, we want to get artists paid and create new opportunities for growth and career development. I am basing this on my experience with Open Studio, and how they have fostered my career, and we just want to provide more! There are never enough opportunities to go around for all artists that live and work in this city, and our dream and goals are to create new chances for artists to expand and thrive in their careers. I think all of us are tired of the starving artist trope – artists are some of the most hardworking people I know, and they deserve a livable and steady income!

EKH: Would you like to add anything else?

DC: I want to thank several artists, including Dan Olsen, Yael Brontman, and Bruce Parsons – a lot of the furniture and equipment was inherited thanks to them, and the trust they put in us to bring new life to these mediums. I also want to thank our entire network and community of artists and colleagues that have donated their time, work, advice, and guidance – without them, none of this would be possible. Finally, I want to say a big thank you to my family – they spent every weekend and even weekdays after work coming and renovating this space. Their support has been beyond generosity. We have built The Artist Studio with help from our community and network, and our mission is to give it all back to every artist in the city and beyond!

*To contact The Artist Studio please go to their website www.theartiststudio.ca, where you can have more information about joining, using the Studio or renting a room.

What the Hand Leaves Behind: Paper and the Preservation of Memory at Propeller Art Gallery

Lea Ovčina, Stories told must face the present and see it stands differently, lithograph and intaglio prints, konnyaku paste, machine sewn, light and heavy Usu Kuchi

In a cultural landscape increasingly shaped by digital technologies, paper has become so commonplace in memory that its material presence is often overlooked. “Looks Good on Paper…”, guest curated by Nancy Jacobi at Propeller Art Gallery, arrives at precisely this moment, inviting viewers to reconsider a medium whose significance extends far beyond its everyday utility. Featuring forty-eight works selected from more than two hundred submissions, the exhibition celebrates paper as an eternal medium of artistic invention and culture. Every work reflects a deliberate engagement with the material itself, revealing how the choice of paper can and undoubtedly does influence meaning just as profoundly as image, form, or technique.

Nancy Jacobi’s longstanding commitment to handmade Japanese paper informs the exhibition from the outset. Her curatorial vision grows from decades spent introducing artists to washi and advocating for traditional papermaking practices whose future has become increasingly uncertain. Rather than presenting paper as an obsolete medium preserved for sentimental reasons, the gallery demonstrates its remarkable vitality through contemporary artistic practice. Washi appears alongside Korean hanji, archival drawing papers, cardboard, flax paper, cotton paper, vintage postage stamps, and commercially produced coloured papers. Each carries its own physical character, allowing viewers to recognize the importance of paper as a material that is never simply a neutral surface. Texture, translucency, absorbency, weight, and fibre become essential elements within the visual language of each work.

Joan Burdett Ness, Arctic Glacier and Kittiwaki, molded washi paper, konnyaku, watercolour, copper wire, Japanese Oguni, snow bleached

The exhibition showcases this sensitivity to material. Moving through the gallery, it becomes impossible to separate the artwork from the paper upon which it exists. Joan Burdett Ness’s Arctic Glacier and Kittiwaki emanates its elegance from snow-bleached kozo paper, whose delicate structure mirrors the fragility of glacial formations. The sculpture seems to inherit its character directly from the material, its lightness suggesting landscapes that appear both enduring and precarious. Sharron Corrigan Forrest’s Wakami Series #1″  reaches a similarly compelling effect through Sekishu Banshi, wrapping the paper around living branches until its flexibility becomes visible in every curve. The paper records the contours of the wood while retaining its own distinct presence, bridging interaction between natural form and handcrafted material.

Sharron Corrigan Forrest, Wakami Series #1, natural inks & water-based pigments, Sekishu Banshi HW, Taniai Kozo Nagaban HW, Taniai Kozo Udaban & HW Washi

Historical memory emerges as another defining thread throughout the exhibition. Loretta Faveri’s Apology recalls the internment of Italian Canadians during the Second World War through paper handmade by the artist’s aunt using local fibres. The work carries a sense of inheritance and archive, connecting personal history with a broader national narrative. The work possesses a meaningful dignity that feels inseparable from the paper upon which it is constructed.

Loretta Faveri, Apology, handwritten text on paper, torn and stitched, paper made by my aunt with locally sourced fibres

A similar sensitivity appears in Marjut Nousiainen’s My Political Papers, where years of notes, correspondence, and newspaper articles accumulate into an installation resembling a carefully prepared fire. The work reflects on political advocacy with remarkable restraint, suggesting both persistence and exhaustion through documents that once promised change. Paper becomes empirical, preserving the traces of conversations, struggles, and histories that resist disappearance.

Marjut Nousiainen, My Political Papers, paper on insulation board, newsprint, printer paper

What gives “Looks Good on Paper…” its lasting resonance is the way these individual works contribute to a broader reflection on the place of paper within contemporary culture. Jacobi raises an important question in the exhibition statement. As handwritten letters, printed newspapers, tickets, menus, and countless other paper objects continue to yield to digital alternatives, what becomes of the tactile knowledge once embedded within everyday life? The exhibition never proposes a nostalgic return to an earlier era, nor does it frame technological progress as something to resist. But instead, it seems to ask viewers to consider what forms of attention emerge through physical materials, and perhaps why we have always turned to them to represent our lives. Paper slows perception. It preserves evidence of the hand. Every fold, stitched seam, printed impression, and torn edge records an encounter between artist and material that cannot be fully translated into digital form. This emphasis on touch feels especially significant because paper has always occupied an unusual position within cultural history. It has served as the foundation for books, maps, correspondence, official records, sketches, photographs, and countless other forms of communication. Entire civilizations have preserved their histories upon its surface. Handmade papers such as washi survive through generations of accumulated knowledge, each sheet carrying techniques refined across centuries. Their continued presence within contemporary art reflects technical craftsmanship alongside a representation of the survival of cultural practices whose value becomes increasingly apparent as they grow less familiar within everyday experience.

“Looks Good on Paper…” installation view at the Propeller Art Gallery

The accompanying artist statements further enrich this experience by revealing the extraordinary care invested in each material decision. Reading them alongside the works deepens an appreciation for the dialogue between concept and craftsmanship that defines the exhibition. Every selection of paper carries intention, whether rooted in cultural heritage, environmental concerns, personal memory, or formal exploration— the exhibition encourages visitors to recognize these decisions as integral to the work rather than incidental details of its construction.

“Looks Good on Paper…” ultimately succeeds because it restores visibility to a material that has quietly receded from ordinary life while demonstrating its enduring artistic relevance. The exhibition honours centuries of papermaking traditions without confining them to the past, revealing instead how deeply they continue to inform contemporary creative practice. At a time when so much of human experience is mediated through screens, Jacobi’s exhibition offers a thoughtful reminder that materials possess histories of their own. Paper remains one of the most eloquent among them, carrying our memory, craftsmanship, and imagination within every fibre.

Yehyun Lee

Images are courtesy of the Propeller Art Gallery.

*Exhibition information: “Looks Good on Paper…” / group show, curated by Nancy Jacobi, July 8 – 26, 2026, Propeller Art Gallery, 30 Abell St, Toronto. Gallery hours: Wed – Sat, 1 – 5:30pm, Sun 12 – 4pm.

Queer Asynchronies and A Shadow Holds at United Contemporary

Queer Asynchronies exhibition view

Wandering in from the summer rain into the gallery, the understated white neon of Steven Beckly’s work greets visitors, Forever and Ever (2019). Queer Asynchronies at United Contemporary contemplates how queer and trans lives exist through plurality, the manifold ways of becoming the self: queer ancestry and culture, lived experiences balanced with futurity, and approaches to world-making. Curator Adrien Sun Hall draws upon José Esteban Muñoz’s theories around queer temporality, recognizing the deviations from “straight time” life trajectory and social dynamics. The artists in the exhibition reflect upon queer temporality with a variety of approaches: comforting the inner child in adulthood, disco as a critical part of queer subculture, speculative love in Christian spaces, modes of bodily and spiritual transformation, and more. 

Considering the immediate encounter of Forever and Ever, Beckly’s work is an apt fixture of temporal expression. The soft neon glow emanates from the handwritten text containing the title, amplifying the cool tones of the gallery walls. There is a chain hanging from the phrase, with a photograph of a disco ball at the end. The work issubtle enough that people walk past without notice. There is beauty in a work communicating an unending duration, existing and witnessing others independent of reciprocation.

Steven Beckley, Forever and Ever, 2019. Neon, silver chain, and colour transparency. Neon: 10 x 34 x 2.5 inches. Chain: variable

To the immediate left of the work is a black curtain, enclosing the screen that plays Jordan King’s video installation Goodbye Clark (2024). Playing out upon the screen are scenes of a home being cared for: painting the windowsill, a moment sitting on the fire escape. Within the video, King prepares the Greenwich Village home for his departure. King had lived there with Clark Render, a major figure in the underground nightlife scene in New York. These moments of caretaking, reflection, and unbuilding a home take place after Clark’s passing in 2019. The film prompts contemplation of placemaking and how places of belonging shift with the inhabitants, whether through loss or movement.

Jordan King, Goodbye Clark, 2024. Digital video, 9:00 minutes

The spirit of belonging and reflection are also found in Natia Lemay’s Held in Different Times (2026), a diptych in oil on canvas. Tones of ochre and umber are built upon the canvases; the layers appear as a soporific haze enveloping the figures in the right panel. The composition of the subjects echoes the pietà, with a seraphic face gazing downwards in devotion. The setting is indiscernible, though an upholstered seat can be identified as segmented across the diptych. Both subjects of Lemay’s pietà are clad in athletic wear, a muscle tee and oversized shorts. As they observe one another, the shared soft features and complexion is noted as a resemblance. The figures are of the same individual at different times. Beholding the self, Lemay displays the desire for comfort while simultaneously being the source.

Natia Lemay, Held in Different Times, 2026. Diptych, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches, 48 x 60 inches

The gesture of embrace is also found among the towers of white boxes that comprise Camille Charbonneau’s series The House Is a Large Cradle (2023-2026). Within the boxes are miniature figures, each containing a (presumed) same sex couple. The outfits are modest and austere, a palette of white, heather grey, mauve, beige, and olive green. The miniature clothing maintains the volume of the body despite being empty. As such, the boxes are devoid of bodies and brimming with tenderness. The yearning of the embrace is salient, as is the consistent incorporation of the Book of Mormon with each of the pairings. Charbonneau’s work is informed by the artist’s experience in the Mormon Church. The House is a Large Cradle considers speculative love that could form during Church missions, in which pairs of women or pairs of men were sent to spread the gospel. Looking at the couples in the box, I can’t help but think that they’ve been raptured in a divine ascension.

Camille Charbonneau. The House Is a Large Cradle, 2023-2026. Polyester, cotton, leather, faux-leather, steel, brass, polymer clay, and paper, dimensions variable for assembled series. Each box: 14 x 9 x 2 inches. Polyester, cotton, leather, faux-leather, steel, brass, polymer clay, and paper

Functioning as the transition point between the two exhibitions is Van Der Hout’s kinetic sculpture, The Shattering (2026). A mounted light shines on the structure as it steadily rotates within the gallery. The sculpture is made of mirrors, soldered together to form a polyhedron of fractures and fragments. The reflections of light trail along the walls of the gallery. As the sculpture turns, snippets of visitors, the environment, and the self are visible: a shoe of mine, a smile of yours, a hand of theirs. The Shattering is evocative of a disco ball, a critical nod to the queer subculture that was bolstered at the height of the genre’s popularity in the 1970s. This was a transformational period for self-expression and visibility, liberation, and solidarity. The structure does not have a completely spherical shape as there are black gaps between the fragments. This is an acknowledgement of the absences within queer history— spaces lost, absences in the archives, missing pieces from the community. The inclusion of such a compelling symbol within Queer Asynchronies affirms the exhibition space as a venue of transformation.

Ry Van Der Hout. The Shattering, 2026. Steel, mirror, solder, copper, disco ball motor, 26 x 26 x 26 inches

Meanwhile, Van Der Hout’s works in the series A Shadow Holds are vibrant and lurid. The colours pool across the glass rather than using a myriad of coloured glass panels. The soldering of the works lacks steadiness of the hand, like an urgency to meld together the pieces. Witnessing the artist’s hand in this way is appealing, in that the process is readily apparent in how the vessels were crafted. The colours upon the glass are incorporated through photography, not through the traditional chemistry of ions added or colloidal particles. By photographing the fragmented glass and using that visual in the creation of a new form, Van Der Hout uses fragments as material, process, and as the conceptual framework of breaking apart to put together again. That line of thinking exists in the same vein of alternate temporalities as the way the creation process can be a non-linear method of both making and existing.

Ry Van Der Hout, a shadow holds 1, 2026. Chromogenic Photogram mounted to dibond, Glass, Solder, Tin, Steel, 20 x 16 x 3 in.

Adrien Sun Hall’s curation of Queer Asynchronies and Ry Van Der Hout’s series A Shadow Holds are a thoughtful display of queer temporality. It highlights the fissures and fractures, reflections and refractions, and the archives and absences within queer history and world-making.

A shadow holds exhibition view

Text and photo: Rashana Youtzy

*Exhibition information: Queer Asynchronies / Group show with Steven Beckly, Camille Charbonneau, Rami George, Dylan Glynn, Jordan King, Natia Lemay, Oluseye, Ry Van Der Hout and Ry Van Der Hout: A Shadow Holds, June 18, 2026 – July 25, 2026, United Contemporary, 129 Tecumseth Street, Toronto. Gallery hours: Wed – Sat 11am – 6 pm.