Sep 20, 2025 to Jan 11, 2026
Sights of Convergence
About the Exhibition
Sights of Convergence features work by Jess Riva Cooper (Toronto, ON), Gabriela García-Luna (Saskatoon, SK), and Stanzie Tooth (Toronto, ON). Each artist brings a distinct material practice and set of concerns to their work, yet all explore the intimate entanglement of human and natural worlds. Rather than treating nature as a passive backdrop, their works invite us to consider a more nuanced, reciprocal exchange, one shaped by perception, memory, and lived experience. Beneath the surface, unsettling realities emerge: anxiety, tension, loss, and the shadow of ecological catastrophe. In this shared space, the gallery becomes a meeting ground, where diverse expressions converge and conversations between works and ideas can take root, grow, and expand.
The exhibition opens with Gabriela García-Luna’s large-scale installation. Merging digital and analogue printing techniques, García-Luna creates works rooted in her lived experience of the land. Originally from Mexico, she documents elements of the Canadian landscape as a way of experiencing and better understanding her new home. She reworks these observations, layering images of flora from various sources without concern for recreating reality as it appears. Instead, García-Luna uses her source material to investigate nature beyond the limits of the naked eye, capturing its essence and fostering a reconnection to the land.
Seeking to disrupt traditional depictions of nature, Stanzie Tooth creates lush and detailed ink-painted landscapes on paper. Teeming with life, these works are adorned with rich foliage and flowers rendered in both black and coloured inks. Tooth’s worlds are imaginative composites, constructed from the artist’s memory and acquired knowledge, to reclaim a sense of belonging within the natural world. Figures populate Tooth’s scenes, appearing in shades of black ink—both part of and apart from nature. Themes of motherhood and the materiality of the natural world also emerge, their presence a source of quiet unease, adding layers of intimacy and connection.
In her clay-based sculptures, Jess Cooper reflects on the persistent, often unseen forces shaping our living environment. Using a range of techniques, glazes, and slips, she transforms organic forms, flowers, vines, and parasitic beings, creating tensions between the beautiful and the grotesque. Plants appear to overtake us, reclaiming space and adapting it for their own survival. Almost as a warning, Cooper’s work hints at a future where the boundaries between the human and the non-human threaten to coalesce.
Curated in response to Kejie Lin’s solo project in the adjacent gallery, the exhibition extends its inquiry, bringing together a plurality of voices and artistic approaches that reflect on the complexities of the environment we inhabit. Across the exhibition, the natural world is not merely observed—it is felt, remembered, and critically questioned.
About the Artists
Jess Riva Cooper is a Toronto-based multi-media artist whose work integrates clay, drawing, and other materials to create intricate sculptures and installation-based artworks. Her pieces often explore themes of mythology, nature, and transformation, blending human and botanical imagery in ways that evoke vulnerability and resilience. In her sculptures, nature reclaims space, with plant forms sprouting, creeping over structures, and creating preternatural transformations that subvert order and invite chaos.
Cooper holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) and a Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Her artistic practice is shaped by residencies at Medalta, The Archie Bray Foundation, and the Kohler Arts/Industry Program, among others. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto and the Cynthia Corbett Gallery in London. Through her sculptures, Cooper addresses ecological concerns and cultural storytelling, encouraging reflection on the interconnectedness of life, decay, and renewal.
Gabriela García-Luna is a multimedia artist living in Treaty Six Territory, Saskatoon, born in Mexico City. Her lens-based practice blends analogue and digital media through photography, drawing, printmaking, video and installation to speak of imprinted memory, sense of place and identity. Her work of semi-abstract and hybrid qualities addresses ideas of fragility and resilience, unity and separation, presence and absence, and beauty and decay, through the investigation of the botanical world in the places she has called home – Mexico, India and Canada. Her work has been exhibited in multiple solo and group exhibitions in Mexico, Canada, UK and India. She has received grants and awards from FONCA (National Foundation for Culture and Art Fellowship in Mexico, The Saskatchewan Arts Board and Canada Council of the Arts among others. Her work is part of public and private collections: Galería Libertad, Colección Omnilife, TD Bank, Saskatchewan Arts Board, MacKenzie Art Gallery and Global Affairs Canada. She holds an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Saskatchewan and a BDes from the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) in Mexico City.
Stanzie Tooth‘s paintings are deeply intertwined with the forests of southern Ontario, where she spent her formative years. Her accumulated bodies of work draw inspiration from the rich tapestry of art history yet strives to capture a narrative that resonates with a more bodily and intersectional experience.
Tooth earned her BFA from OCAD University and obtained an MFA with distinction from the University of Ottawa. In 2015, she was honoured with the Joseph Plaskett Award for Painting, facilitating her residencies in Berlin, Iceland, Greece, and Italy. Tooth’s contributions have been recognized by Canadian Art Magazine, The Toronto Star, and Now Magazine. Her paintings are included in private and corporate collections, such as The Royal Bank, Toronto Dominion Bank, A.T. Tolley Collection, Equitable Bank, Google Collection, the City of Ottawa, and St. Michael’s Hospital. Tooth is based in Toronto, Canada.
