2020 Exhibitions

September 26 - December 5, 2020

As one of Canada’s most important artists, Liz Magor has been producing a broad spectrum of sculptural objects, installations, and photography since the mid-1970s. She is best known for sculptures made from both found and cast objects that quietly, yet intensely pull our focus to the things that surround us everyday. Often presenting delicate items in harsh places, Magor creates structures that support fragile and vulnerable things; a practice, one could say, of care. Her work reveals how ordinary objects contain latent qualities that are obscured by our intentions as we acquire, use, and discard these items. In her sculptural arrangements Magor allows things to form relationships with each other that reveal their emotional and historic burdens and strengths.

September 26 - December 5, 2020

Samuel Roy-Bois’ practice is concerned with the conceptual and material definition of space and the ways the built environment and manufactured things contribute to our understanding of the world. Through sculpture, site-specific installation, and photography, Roy-Bois examines relational networks of objects and their complex philosophical considerations: How do we define ourselves through the creation of structures? Is it possible to conceive of one’s existence outside any material linkage? We make things, but are things also making us?

September 26 - December 5, 2020

Jon Sasaki’s multidisciplinary practice delves into the potentially generative outcomes of failure and futility. Killing One Bird with Half a Stone centres around a selection of the artist’s videos from the past decade that depict the artist as a solitary protagonist who persistently, sometimes recklessly, refuses to accept the obsolescence, failure, or inadequacy of everyday objects. In To Change a Lightbulb (2017), Sasaki resolutely maneuvers a burnt-out lightbulb in the hopes of reconnecting the broken filament and re-illuminating the bulb, if only fleetingly. In Motivation (2013), he shakes a pendant lamp with a frayed cord, which illuminates briefly – tantalizingly – if shaken just so, before inevitably disconnecting again. When faced with the task of scaling a wall in Ladder Stack (2009), he perches multiple step ladders on top of one another, gradually and precariously climbing out of the camera’s view.

January 25 - August 29, 2020

Esker Foundation presented an in-depth look at Katie Ohe’s sculptural practice and her unparalleled approach to material, form, space, and movement. This exhibition brought together sculptural work spanning six decades of Ohe’s remarkable career, marking the largest and most comprehensive solo exhibition of her work to date. The exhibition also drew from Ohe’s material archive, revealing a glimpse of a process devoted to research, inquiry, and visual or formal problem solving.

Ohe is best known for her abstract steel sculptures; organic forms that evoke the undulatory surface of a pool of water, the crest of a rolling hill or cumulonimbus cloud, or the cadence of a walking figure. The surfaces of many of these sculptures are subsequently chromed or polished, creating a flawlessly smooth exterior that conjures an illusion of weightlessness and is also irresistible to touch. Indeed, many of Ohe’s works are fully activated only by the push of a human hand. She remarks, “I want my sculptures to induce or invoke touch before you think that you really shouldn’t.”