2021 Exhibitions

RELATIONS: Diaspora and Painting

July 24 - November 27, 2021

Larry Achiampong, Hurvin Anderson, Kamrooz Aram, Moridja Kitenge Banza, Firelei Báez,
Frank Bowling, Cy Gavin, Barkley L. Hendricks, Lubaina Himid, Bharti Kher, Rick Leong,
Manuel Mathieu, Julie Mehretu, Jordan Nassar, Yoko Ono, Maia Cruz Palileo, Rajni Perera,
Ed Pien, Jessica Sabogal, Marigold Santos, Yinka Shonibare CBE, Shanna Strauss,
Curtis Talwst Santiago, Mickalene Thomas, Salman Toor, Hajra Waheed, Jinny Yu

Curated by Cheryl Sim

This group exhibition explores the multiple and complex meanings of the idea of the diaspora, its condition, and its experiences as expressed in painting. “Diaspora issues and concepts are of particular importance to me as a person of colour, born in Canada with mixed Asian origins,” says curator and director Cheryl Sim. The wide spectrum of interpretations and fruitful relationships attached to diaspora experiences knows no bounds, which promotes constant dialogue with notions of kinship and identity in the current context of globalization and mass migration.

This exhibition offers a selection of works by artists who address the question of the diaspora from various points of view, approaches, and aesthetic languages. With a rich and complex history, painting is a particularly stimulating mode of expression for exploring a variety of issues comparable to the multiplicity of the diasporic experience. All the works on display aim to establish an intergenerational dialogue and to present artists whose work has contributed to pushing the limits of what painting is and can be. Given the open and discursive nature of the subject, the exhibition does not claim to be exhaustive, but rather seeks to generate ideas and encourage dialogue.

RELATIONS: Diaspora and Painting is organized by the Phi Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montreal, and presented in collaboration with the Esker Foundation.

Yvonne Kustec: The Garden

In a street-level window gallery space, which has a pale pink painted floor and walls, a life-size pink ceramic female figure stands on a low circular plinth that is covered in white and red fake fur. On the floor around the figure are several dark green and blue snakes. The body and head of the figure is covered in clay forms of flowers and leaves, the figure has long pink hair that almost reaches the floor. The hands are holding pink hair strands which have snake heads. On the wall behind the figure are several yellow ochre, orange and pink ceramic flower heads.]

February 8 - June 6, 2021

Within The Garden a human figure transforms into a dense landscape, overrun by flora and fauna. Drawing on the long history of floral work in clay, Kustec works to honour both the tradition of the craft and the delicacy and resiliency of nature through recreating its intricacies. Her sculptural works draw on nature as a metaphor for both transformation and regeneration. Elaborately rendered flowers and snakes act as symbolic representations of the virtues, attributes, and characterizations of femininity. Through these symbolic entities she seeks to work through her relationship to identity and the feminine by reflecting on her connections to tradition, representation, and patriarchal narratives and systems, in turns questioning, embracing, or redefining and rewriting them.

Louise Bourgeois: What is the Shape of This Problem, From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation

January 23 - June 26, 2021

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Although best known for her profound sculptures of monumental spiders, evocative human figures, and fleshly anthropomorphic forms, Louise Bourgeois maintained a prolific drawing and writing practice and an ongoing interest in illustrated books and printmaking throughout the course of her long career.

Louise Bourgeois: What is the Shape of This Problem presents 119 works with a focus on prints, textiles, and a series of eight holograms, ranging in date from the 1940s to the early 2000s. These works build on the raw emotional terrain of Bourgeois’ practice, and explore feelings of isolation, anger, and fear through the recurring depiction of the body, childhood, family, architecture, and the passage of time.

Chris Curreri: Thick Skull, Thin Skin

January 23 - June 26, 2021

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Chris Curreri’s works complicate and dissolve seemingly dichotomous states of tenderness and violence; abjection and beauty; seduction and revulsion; self and other. They suggest an unravelling of the hermetic borders that have been constructed between us, others, and things in the world.

This exhibition brings together sculptural and photographic bodies of work that form and frame a sense of porousness and consider the tension between moments where things become fixed and the possibility of continuous, nearly imperceptible shifts—the suggestion that bodies and matter can and do exist within a continuum of potentialities.

Fin Simonetti: An Appeal to Heaven

January 23 - June 26, 2021

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Fin Simonetti works with sculpture, installation, and drawing to investigate the uneasy terrain among our desire for security, states of fragility and vulnerability, and the sensorial, emotional, and psychological relationships we have to objects, bodies, and spaces. Her work adopts forms and imagery with corporal, visceral resonance that poetically undermine our senses of familiarity and ease. An Appeal to Heaven presents recent works in carved stone and stained glass that, through paradoxical relationships between form and material, connect to themes of emergency, protection, and control.

Simonetti’s use of stained glass and stone are resonant with historical and familial connections. She learned to work in stained glass – a trade practiced by generations of Italian immigrant families, including her own – from her paternal uncle who designed and fabricated windows for cathedrals and private homes. Stained glass often evokes thoughts of religious architecture, beauty, and sanctuary, but here, configured into the jagged open jaws of two bear traps, the material suggests something quite different—something threatening, dangerous, yet ultimately disastrously futile in its function.