Re(Moved) at the Red Head Gallery Feb 2-12, 2022

Re(Moved), an exhibition of paintings on cardboard and on canvas, was informed by my experiences with displacement through Toronto’s housing crisis and in my family’s past. It also reflects my ongoing interest in seriality as a creative method and speaks to broader themes of shelter and impermanence.

Containers and compartments emerged as a persistent theme. These physical and metaphorical objects signify boundaries, bonds, and holders of memories and fantasies. In this particular series, they also reference home, shelter, and a space for the body. While using these images, I teeter between “story” and “history” to insinuate narratives, both factual and fictional.

I experienced Toronto’s ongoing disappearance of artist spaces and extreme housing precarity of renters first hand after being forced, along with all tenants, to leave my longtime home and studio spaces. During that time I was also engaging with images from my family history in Poland that includes stories of movement during WWII, expropriation of land and property during post-war communist regime and, more recently, displacement through emigration and economic instability. Spaces and our right to exist within them became top concerns.

In the works on cardboard, subjects are painted on canvas and then cut out and re-contextualized onto more ephemeral and utilitarian corrugated box cardboard. In shifting to more disposable supports, I point to the tension and discomfort I feel while continuing to make objects in a world with too many objects and acknowledge the fatigue I have experienced while repeatedly moving and storing things during recent residential and studio moves. These collaged works on cardboard speak to precarity and non-permanence.

The exhibition was supported by Ontario Arts Council through the Exhibition Assistance Grant.

Additionally, this work was presented at the 61st Toronto Outdoor Art Fair in the summer of 2022, also with the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council’s Exhibition Assistance Grant.