XPACE CULTURAL CENTRE

MAIN SPACE: Productive Discomfort curated by Lauren Cullen

Susan Blight, Heidi Cho, Kaythi, Seiji, Anne Rucchetto, Jessica Watkin, and James Yeboah

March 1-30, 2019

Productive Discomfort is a project and group exhibition encompassing seven hooked rugs, each conceptually designed and produced around the theme of ‘unwelcome mats’. Contributing artists, who predominantly work in non-rug hooking mediums, learned the technique through a series of collaborative workshop led by Toronto-based artist and facilitator Lauren Cullen.

Canadian hooked mats are often exhibited as domestic objects greeting guests with good cheer. Anti-racist, anti-colonial and feminist queer crip perspectives remind us however that objects and spaces are never truly welcoming to all. While a hooked rug marks a threshold and communicates an expectation of serving, Productive Discomfort rubs up against this promise and explores what can happen when we draw attention to that which is unwelcome. Thus this exhibition invites the audience to consider the following question; how can unwelcome rugs and social aspects of rug hooking serve as a disruptive force?

Productive Discomfort is part of Myseum Intersections: Revisionist Toronto.

WINDOW SPACE: Maddy Mathews, Do I Have to Lie to My Diary?

March 1 – April 6, 2019

With today’s constant flow of information and images, there is always something new to react or relate to, creating a feeling of imminent unease. Do I Have to Lie to my Diary? is a large-scale pencil crayon drawing featuring hyper-recognizable references, jokes, bright colours and patterns, illustrating both popular culture and art history. A corresponding full-body paper mâché portrait with two faces is simultaneously taking in the artwork displayed behind her, while checking in with her peers (which in this case, are the passersby on the street) unsure of how to react to it.

PROJECT SPACE: Emily G Harrison, Wicked Game

March 1-30, 2019

Wicked Game presents a new series of large format paintings embracing the low-art materiality of plasticine, pairing its playful tactility with creatures, figures and motifs that are hyper-saturated and frenzied.

Over the last year, Emily Harrison has been researching European art historical movements such as Rococo, Baroque and religious allegorical paintings alongside popular Western fairy tales and folklore. Delving into her own thought patterns and anxieties as a starting point for content, Wicked Game looks both inward and outward, confronting the psychological and the mythical. Materially, this exhibition exists in a realm between painting and sculpture, with imagery caught between the dream and the disquieted.

PROJECT SPACE: Arezu Salamzadeh, Fortune Flavors The Bold

January 18th – February 16, 2019

Arezu Salamzadeh is a Toronto-born artist who can’t speak Cantonese.

Fortune Flavors the Bold is a room warded for good luck, inspired by the symbols and spiritual cures of the household in which the artist grew up with her mother, an immigrant from Hong Kong. Like many second generation children who grew up in the West, she  examines what it means to be part of a distant culture, whose language one does not speak. Salamzadeh’s understanding of Chinese culture is informed by observing her mother performing Chinese Traditional Medicine rituals and superstitious actions .

In this ‘room for good luck’, focus is given to ceramic lucky cats, dragons, ginseng, and other objects endowed with the ability to change our futures. The unification of these works is an attempt to live vicariously through these mischievous dictators of fate and partake in the sharing good fortune.

WINDOW SPACE: Cat Lamora, The Aberrant

January 18 – February 23rd, 2019

The Aberrant is a three dimensional paper installation that attempts to address the experience of a gyopo — a term for Korean expatriates who have been citizens in their new countries for longer than a decade.

With this work, Cat Lamora questions the affect of expatriation in Korean-Canadian gyopos selfhood, and the deafening loneliness produced by the conflict of navigating the culture one is born into versus the newly adopted. Having to lead a life of duality between  two names, two cultures, and two homes, the piece seeks to express the balancing act that gyopos struggle to reconcile with.

The Aberrant is a participating exhibition in DesignTO 2019.

wave // Carson Teal x Xuan Ye x Korea Town Acid x Online Threat

February  9, 2019

An afternoon of sound by exhibiting artists Carson Teal and Xuan Ye, and performers Korea Town Acid and Oscar Chiu performed within the landscape of Soft Refractions. For wave, Teal and Ye will animate the spaces in which their respective works are exhibited. Korea Town Acid and Oscar Chiu provide a textural blend of experimental beats. wave invites participants to find the space between frequencies and to engage in a spectrum of sonic experience.

MAIN SPACE: Soft Refractions curated by Mary Chen and Theresa Wang

DeBugReBoot, Jessy Kitchen, HaeAhn Kwon, IvanovStoeva, Carson Teal, Xuan Ye

January 18 – February 16, 2019

The word “refraction” declares breakage from form. Used to characterize an optical phenomenon tracing the speed of light as it traverses material barriers, refraction inherently speaks to rendering the non-material visible through an alternative way of seeing. The works featured in Soft Refractions demonstrate a desire to destabilize established value systems, and, in turn, mine for new capacities. As manners of representation stretch rapidly into new forms, this exhibition looks at the boundary for otherwise encounters to invoke a mediated articulation of the contemporary world.

Xpace acknowledges the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council for this exhibition.

WINDOW SPACE: Arshia Salesi, How the Curve Fits Inside the Square

October 26, 2018- January 5th, 2019

The ongoing series, How the Curve Fits Inside the Square investigates painting’s relationship to its three-dimensional surroundings that consists of curvey abstracted Arabic letters. In its fourth iteration, a text-image relationship is used to explore the function of language in public space. Colour aims to challenge Orientalist views and provide new possibilities of understanding. The work analyzes the nuances of transculturality through a non-hierarchical lens by visualizing a newly developed complex space that has resulted from the intermixing of various cultures in a diverse cosmopolitan like Toronto.

PROJECT SPACE: Eve Tagny, Sanctuaries

October 26 – December 1, 2018

In the garden, mourning ceases to exist, it’s the gardeners’ luck: they concern themselves with the present and think about future seasons.” claimed famed landscape architect Pascal Cribier. A garden simultaneously encompasses all stages of disappearance and of growth, therefore being a space of constant becoming. Driven by the mourners’ pressing need to materialize absence, Sanctuaries presents a garden filled with humble memorial monuments, acts of remembrance anchored in natural substances and spaces. Photographic images, here treated as testaments and vestiges of personal and collective memory, are intertwined with natural materials − soil, stones and wild flowers − as to reintegrate the natural cycle, mend traumatic ruptures caused by loss and reinstate a sense of normalcy and continuity.