CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
Gabriela García-Luna
: Land-Water-Passages
February 7 - April 27, 2025
Reception and Artist Talk, April 4, 7pm
There is the surface. Now think – or rather feel, intuit – what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way. Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, fantasy. – Susan Sontag
In this body of work, Gabriela García-Luna probes the fleeting and the elusive. Using a blend of digital collage, drawing, mark making, and sculpture, the artist layers photographic images of plants from places she has called home; Saskatchewan and Mexico. The works are not concerned with representing what we consider “reality” but rather with highlighting the intangible, impermanent, and fragile parts of human experience – arguably, the places where existence becomes meaningful.
In speaking of her work, García-Luna offers the notion, “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” Greek philosopher Heraclitus coined that phrase to articulate his theory that nothing is permanent except change. Following that thought, this work welcomes us to look beneath the surface of life’s river and recognize both the seen and the unseeable as we embrace what cannot be held. Though it may seem at odds, the moments that shape our memories – the constant of change – is integral to finding our home places.
Storied Telling:
Performativity & Narrative in Photography
Catherine Blackburn, Lori Blondeau, Xiao Han, Mariam Magsi, Meryl McMaster, Laura St. Pierre
February 7 - April 27, 2025
Reception, April 4, 7pm
The exhibition, Storied Telling, features photographic works by Canadian artists, whose images present as lens-based performance. The photographs reflect a performative nature, taken as video stills or documentation of performance art or presented as elaborate figurative compositions within settings that border on the fantastical or are imagined recreations of historic scenarios. In their adornment and positioning within their environments, the subjects of the photographs become powerfully iconographic. The resulting images are rife with story, reflecting diverse narratives that are poetic, political, surreal, spiritual, or perhaps even mythic; stories that inform and speak to cultural and diaspora identities that are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew through transformation and difference.