Caroline Popiel
And if I lived there i would be home | October 2023
There’s a space, intangible and hidden.
Between rivets of carpet,
creases in wallpaper,
joints in furniture.
Here, in object-space,
somewhere between here and there,
there are no words, no authorship.
These words don’t belong to me.
And if I’d sleep,
I’d dream of a place that doesn’t exist.
And if I lived there, I would be home.
Between rivets of carpet,
creases in wallpaper,
joints in furniture.
Here, in object-space,
somewhere between here and there,
there are no words, no authorship.
These words don’t belong to me.
And if I’d sleep,
I’d dream of a place that doesn’t exist.
And if I lived there, I would be home.
Caroline Popiel is an artist and curator, living and working in Tkaronto. She graduated from the University of Guelph in 2017, with a Bachelor of Arts in studio art and a minor in art history. Popiel’s artistic practice deals with the contradictions in established systems or hierarchies; the interior and the exterior, the animate and inanimate, the real and fictional. She is also influenced by the philosophy of Object Oriented Ontology, which deals with the metaphysical world of objects and the effects of that world on our perceived world.
Click here for exhibition Guide
Emerald Repard-Denniston
She's been haunting me in my dreams | september 2023
click here to view exhibition statement
Emerald Repard-Denniston is visual artist based in Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam/Vancouver, and Tkaronto/Toronto. She is a multidisciplinary artist drawn to painting, digital media, and activist work. Emerald’s current art practice revolves around contemporary figurative oil painting. Through her practice she plays around with humour, cynicism, and detachment. Emerald explores the influences of Western politics and culture, having conversations around the nuances of cultural criticism. Her research focuses on contextualizing issues within the contemporary and social world, including: issues of representation, diasporic story telling, and feminist/queer theories.
This exhibit is part of gallery weekend toronto 2023 (september 21-24)
click here to see highlights from our event!
lauren prousky
Open Channel neutral agent | august 2023
open channel neutral agent is a meditation on my struggles with body image and images in general, sometimes conflating the two in the process. I’ve lived most of my life in a body that never felt complete or good enough and this body also frequently made pictures that felt similarly underwhelming. Ample time spent mulling over what to consume and what to expel eventually led me to consider my gut and how it, for the most part, works the same regardless of if a meal (or a studio day) was mentally fraught or fully enjoyed. I found something inspiring in this base neutrality and thought that maybe it could be applied to my image making practice as well. Intestines—with their radical indifference, quite power and tenderness— became my muse. In the somewhat obsessive depictions of entrails, I hope to move towards something akin to body neutrality with the repetitive path/intestine imagery acting as a way to honour the various processes that keep me moving even when I feel otherwise stuck.
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Lauren Prousky is an artist, writer and culture worker based in Kitchener. Creative experimentation, collaboration and interdisciplinarity are central to her work. She is often working on several different projects at a time, each with their own research tracts and material explorations. Lauren has an MFA from the University of Waterloo and a BFA from Concordia University. Recent exhibitions include the CAFKA Bienniale, Public Sweat x UWAG, School of Art Gallery, The plumb, Xpace and Cambridge Art Galleries. She was the inaugural 2023 AGO x RBC Emerging Artist-in-Residence for her project, Black Tie Soup Night, a party and participatory performance that took place at the Art Gallery of Ontario in April 2023. She has published work with Public Parking, Untethered, SUM and Peripheral Review and has curated exhibitions within a variety of contexts including Lumen Festival, Gallery Stratford, Apollo Cinema and a public pool.
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Liz Decoste
Transfigurations | June/july 2023
Transfigurations explores material transformation as both a process and metaphor with which to explore my history in the Catholic church as a transmasculine person. Informed by queer ecology, I complicate existing narratives in religious aesthetics through the metaphoric and the poetic. Based in the sustainable collection of natural and salvaged materials, my work explores the environment as a source of inspiration and material, while layering aesthetics from opposing ways of knowing: religion and queerness. The work consists of handkerchiefs created through natural dyeing, cyanotype, and screenprint methods. Through the use of natural materials, recognizable queer symbols, and references to Hal Fischer’s “Gay Semiotics”, this work embeds queer flagging semiotics within religious aesthetics in order to draw linkages between the domination of nature and the oppression of queer people. Transfigurations approaches material transformation in order to complicate narratives around ritual, reverence, and identity.
Liz DeCoste (they/them) is a cross-disciplinary artist living and working on Treaty 13 Territory in Toronto, Ontario, the territory of the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabeg, the Wendat, the Chippewa, and the Mississaugas of the Credit nations. They graduated from OCADU in 2022 with BFA in Cross-disciplinary arts and a minor in printmaking and publications. DeCoste grew up on Treaty 4 Territory in Regina, Saskatchewan, an upbringing that has influenced their work about human-nature relationships. Their work spans diverse mediums and engages with collection methodologies to explore the environment as a source of inspiration, metaphor, and material, while layering aesthetics from opposing ways of knowing.