21 WADE AVE #2 | TORONTO

Break it to me gently
4 Aug - 9 Sept 2023

Featuring works by:
Raúl Aguilar Canela, Leeay Aikawa, Vanessa Brown, Nathan Eugene Carson, Patrick Cruz, Melissa Doherty, David R. Harper, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, Oreka James, Miao Xuan Liu, and Shellie Zhang

Break it To Me Gently invites you to explore feelings inspired by the hazy days of summer: nostalgia, joy, healing, and wonder. As we gently ease into fall, this exhibition encourages you to savour the remaining rays of sunshine and reflect on the season as it passes.

Raúl Aguilar Canela is a Mexican-born artist based in Montreal whose main work explores painting as a post-medium practice. His current work serves as a space to converge personal stories with contemporary metanarratives of individual determination, self-exploitation, immigration, masculinity, and hard work. He received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA) in 2021. He holds a BFA from Concordia University (Montréal) in 2014 and a Bachelor in International Relations from Universidad de las Américas, (Puebla) in 2011. Aguilar Canela has participated in residency programs at Banff Centre and Est-Nord-Est. His solo exhibitions include I’ll teach my kids how to be aesthetically correct at Centre CLARK (2017), The State of Our Employability at TAP Art Space (2018) both in Montreal, and To my friends at Egret Egress (2019) in Toronto. In 2019, his work was selected to be part of the Bienal de Pintura Rufino Tamayo XVIII, in México City.

Leeay Aikawa’s work spans a vast array of media and explores the trinity between 'making,' 'knowing,' and 'being,' while merging spiritual and art practice. She employs methodologies such as collage, foraging, non-linear narrative, season and weather-based improvisation, from an eco-spiritualist framework to approach oneness in an increasingly dividing world. Aikawa lives and works in Toronto/T’karonto. She received her Interdisciplinary Master’s in Art and BDes in Illustration both from OCAD University. She has initiated various collaborative projects with local artists as a form of decolonizing art practice through togetherness. She has participated in group exhibitions at Ignite Gallery, Artscape Gibraltar Point and Xpace Cultural Centre. Coupled with this, she is a yoga instructor, which makes her art practice deeply informed by yogic philosophy. She worked as an assistant painter for Michael Lin’s Archipelago mentorship project at MOCA (2020) and was hosted by Paradise Air, Japan (2019).

Vanessa Brown is an artist who works in sculpture and installation. Her primary medium is steel and she is interested in challenging its historical associations with industry, war, and monument, by focusing its subtler qualities such as pliability, versatility, and slightness. The imagery in her work draws from various sources including landscapes, historical crafts, recurring symbols from her own dreams, feminized labour, gestures of comfort, and ideas of escape. She has exhibited in Canada, Germany, Luxembourg, the USA, and Mexico, notably with solo and two- person exhibitions at Patel Brown, Toronto; The Esker Foundation, Calgary; Arsenal, Toronto; Projet Pangée, Montreal; The Western Front, Vancouver; The Armory Show, New York; and group exhibitions at the Nanaimo Art Gallery; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; and King Street Station, Seattle.

Nathan Eugene Carson’s heavily layered paint and collage works explore hybrid creatures, animals and human figures - both fictional and historical. His subjects emerge from richly-pigmented surfaces, and shed light on narratives that weave together themes of Black identity and history, personal memories, and charged symbolism. Carson holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Ontario College of Art and Design. His drawings and paintings have been featured in several solo and group exhibitions across Canada. Carson’s recent travelling solo-exhibition, Cut From The Same Cloth (2020-2021), was presented at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and the Meridian Arts Centre, Toronto. He is currently the RBC Artist-In-Residence at the Art Gallery of Hamilton where he is completing a yearlong exhibition titled Black Carnival (2023).

Patrick Cruz is an artist, curator, and educator. Cruz often makes work that draws aspects from folk spirituality, notions of play, and diasporic experience. In 2021, he received the Thirteen Artist Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines and was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2019 and won the 17th RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2015. Before migrating to Canada, Cruz studied painting at the University of the Philippines Diliman and received his BFA from Emily Carr University. He holds an MFA from the University of Guelph and a certificate in Pochinko clowning. Cruz is a cross-appointed Assistant Professor in Studio Art at the Arts, Culture, and Media Department at the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus and Master of Visual Studies at John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Cruz is a member of the Kamias Collective which hosts the Kamias Triennial and The Ben Flores Fan Club Collective which focuses on curating diasporic artists and narratives.

Melissa Doherty is a mid-career artist with solo exhibitions including the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Sherbrooke, Quebec, the Doris McCarthy Art Gallery, University of Toronto, and Galerie Art Mur, Montreal. Select group exhibitions include Harbourfront Centre, The Art Gallery of Guelph and Christinerose Gallery (New York). She is included in Carte Blanche Volume 2: Painting, a survey of contemporary Canadian painters, and was awarded the Laura Ciruls Painting Award from the Ontario Arts Foundation. Doherty is a recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council. Her work is in numerous private, public, and corporate collections, including the Canada Council Art Bank, Sir Elton John and David Furnish, Four Seasons, BMO, TELUS, the University of Toronto, RBC and the Progressive Art Collection, U.S.

David R. Harper’s work employs materials such as embroidery, ceramic, and casting non-traditional materials such as bone, salt and charcoal in a cross disciplinary manner to create objects installations that grapple with notions of loss, love, fragmentation and feelings of belonging and how we use objects to inform our notions of self. Harper received his BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Fiber and Material Studies. His work has been included in group and solo shows at museums in the US and Canada, and can be found a number of notable collections including The Museum of Arts and Design and The National Gallery of Canada. 

Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka engages in time-intensive, historic processes connected to her Japanese heritage that support her thinking around community-building, environment, and honouring evolving cultural practices such as relief-printmaking, papermaking and kamiko, the practice of sewing garments out of konnyaku starch-strengthened washi (Japanese paper). Her seminal work “Hazmat Suit (unborn/ reborn tsunami)” was acquired by the National Gallery of Canada in 2021 and is exhibited in the contemporary gallery. Her individually and collaboratively authored work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the British Museum and Canada House in London; the Toronto Biennial of Art; the Guanlan International Printmaking Base, Shenzen, China; and the Nikkei National Museum, Burnaby, British Columbia.

Oreka James creates paintings and sculptures of portals to alternative realms, in which moments of love, spirituality, the metaphysical and the ephemeral collide. James received their BFA in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University while studying Furniture Design. They have completed a group residency at Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto) and have shown work at NADA (New York), Pangée (Montréal), Efrain Lopez Project Space (Chicago), Cooper Cole (Toronto), Patel Brown (Toronto), Mercer Union (Toronto), Gallery 44 (Toronto), and Margin of Eras Gallery (Toronto). Their work is part of the permanent collection at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts.

Miao Xuan Liu (b. 1998, Tkaronto/Toronto) is an emerging visual artist interested in the movement of poetry, frailty, trauma, and affect through bodies and environments. Formally trained in textile and ceramics, Miao approaches form with a craft sensibility that seeks out the metaphoric potential of material. She is interested in the convergence of the personal and collective in a contemporary project of de-colonial and feminist meaning making. Miao graduated in 2023 with a Bachelors in Material Art and Design from OCAD University, where she won the program medal. She has an upcoming residency and solo show at Xpace Cultural Centre in Summer 2023 (Tkaronto).

Shellie Zhang is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. By uniting both past and present iconography with the techniques of mass communication, language and sign, Zhang explores the contexts and construction of a multicultural society by disassembling approaches to tradition, gender, history, migration and popular culture. Zhang is interested in how culture is learned and sustained, and how the objects and iconographies of culture are remembered and preserved. Zhang has exhibited at venues including WORKJAM (Beijing), Asian Art Initiative (Philadelphia) and Gallery 44 (Toronto). In 2017, She was an Artist-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario. In 2021, she was a recipient of the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Award.