Presented in partnership with Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival Longing Belonging, 100 Years 100 Stories, a community engagement project and exhibition organized by the collective Long Time No See (LTNS), tackles Canada’s troubled colonialist history by marking the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act. LTNS members engaged with local Markham communities, interviewing and photographing people in spaces that […]
Field Notes was awarded the Innovation in a Collections Based Exhibition at the 2023 Galeries Ontario/Ontario Galleries Awards! About the Exhibition Field Notes brings together historical sketches by F. H. Varley with contemporary animation and drawings by Winnie Truong. Although their bodies of work and approaches to art-making are vastly different, both artists share a desire […]
About the Exhibition Sara Angelucci transforms found photographs and creates images exposing the cultural and historical conditions outside the image frame, bringing attention to the social forces that generate the language of photography. Undergrowth brings together several bodies of work produced over the last decade that examine the ways in which photographic practices have contributed to the […]
About the Exhibition Chun Hua Catherine Dong brings together two major performance and photographic series by the Chinese-born, Montreal-based artist—Skin Deep (2014–20) and I Have Been There (2015–ongoing)—along with a selection of recent VR (Virtual Reality), AR (Augmented Reality), and 3D-printed works that address themes of diaspora, gender, and belonging. Dong reinterprets traditional Chinese symbols and practices to […]
About the Exhibition Janet Jones and Michel Daigneault are contemporary painters who question and challenge our understanding of abstraction. Aware of and informed by historical and formal definitions of the genre, they see abstraction as moving beyond specific movements to convey broader meaning today. Both artists look to abstraction as a way to explore different realities, or […]
About the Exhibition Refracting the Lens is a two-part exhibition marking the Varley Art Gallery of Markham’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Part I: February 4, 2022 to September 4, 2022 Featuring the work of Shuvinai Ashoona, Franklin Carmichael, Emily Carr, A. J. Casson, Maurice Cullen, Kathleen Daly, Clarence Gagnon, Lawren Harris, A. Y. Jackson, F. H. Johnston, […]
About the Exhibition For the past several years, Montreal-based artist Karen Tam 譚嘉文 has searched for traces of Lee Chao Nam 李趙南. Lee was a Chinese Canadian painter who lived in Victoria, British Columbia in the 1930s. Little is known about Lee’s life and artistic practice. Having first discovered Lee in the journals of Canadian painter Emily Carr (1871–1945), Tam […]
About the Exhibition Elusive Desires traces the intimacies and (be)longings of two queer Asian diasporic artists: Ness Lee (they/she) and Florence Yee (they/theirs). Both descendants of the Chinese diaspora (Hakka and Cantonese, respectively), Lee and Yee queer mythologies of the nation, settler colonial imaginaries that pervade Canadian art history, and trouble notions of seamless assimilation into […]
About the Exhibition Can we recollect past emotion-spatial experiences for the purpose of some attempt at representation? Can we go back to the past terrains and past encounters which are mapped inside us and which colour our present in ways which we cannot easily feel or say?– Owain Jones [De]/[Re]constructing place explores the act of […]
About the Exhibition Jessica Thalmann is attracted to the limits of photography and the ways in which she can push the parameters of the medium both formally and conceptually. She is not interested in using the camera merely to document, but as a tool to explore how images can be de-constructed and re-contextualized. As seen […]
