Upcoming Exhibitions

September 26 - December 19, 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 19, 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?

For this new body of work, “Presences,” Roy-Bois has created an ensemble of constructed and found objects that consider our contemporary material knowledge. His discrete architectural sculptures act as vessels for everyday things and are separated from the gallery’s architecture by platforms. This series of site-specific improvisational installations present everyday objects in new ways, blur the boundaries between art and life, and shift ordinary things and spaces into a poetic dimension. By connecting sculpture, everyday objects, floor, and ceiling, Roy-Bois manipulates the gallery space as a strategy to create a genuine and direct relationship with the viewer, and his use of everyday items offers a way of understanding our relationship to our environment.

September 26 - December 19, 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.

The exhibition’s newest work, “Improvised Travel Adapters” (2018-ongoing), documents an ongoing series of temporary sculptures composed of repurposed objects, jury rigged to serve as adapters for international electric sockets. Sasaki engineers travel adapters by jamming conductive materials — safety pins, paper clips, or metal nail files — between a plug and a socket, scorning well-intentioned warnings in hotel rooms that urge travellers to avoid using multiple devices at once. Through this flirtation with failure and possible electric shock, Sasaki references the disorientation of arriving somewhere new and being confronted with the need to improvise and make do, heightened by our intense need to access our electronic devices – to never let them lose power or connection, despite the inanity of their contents.