Installations at Art Toronto 2025

A fourth-generation quilter, McIntosh's practice is deeply rooted in fiber. He uses this heritage as a language, for it offers him both a tactile trace of kinship and a political platform. In Entanglements, the artist takes up the metaphorical potential of plant life, where he finds speculative roots for constructing and exploring queer ecologies. McIntosh rejects the colonialist and heteronormative paradigms that dominate botany in its perpetual "othering" of homosexuality. Instead, he asks how we might imagine homosexuality through the sexual and gendered dynamics present in the plant world. Through botanic appliqué, these quilts entangle cover images and news stories from 1980s issues of “The Body Politic.” While some of these archival sources highlight the progress made in terms of visibility and rights, they also invite reflection on the current erosion of these gains and the challenges still faced by queer communities today.

Dialogue is an installation of two canvases suspended in the air. On each visible side, a carefully embroidered image gives the illusion of a finished, autonomous motif. On the back: threads escape, extend outward and connect to the other pieces. Together, these threads form a suspended network, both taut and chaotic, revealing the underlying relationships between the elements.

The canvases are hung opposite one another, in a way that allows the threads to converge toward the center of the installation. These floating connections create a three-dimensional structure in space, physically linking each piece to the others. The arrangement follows a closed configuration with the suspended threads occupying the core of the installation.

Each canvas may appear complete on its own, but from the back, it reveals its interdependence. The work highlights what connects and circulates between elements, emphasizing the gap between the visible image and the hidden structure that supports it.

At the core of this work lies a simple yet powerful gesture: the intersection of two separate entities. Each element — a painted MDF panel, precisely cut and formed — stands independently, but it is only when they meet, when their paths cross, that something new emerges.

The panels slide into each other using a cross-joint system, locking in place without the need for glue or hardware. This structural simplicity reflects a deeper metaphor — one of unity through difference. The encounter between the two parts creates a third presence: a sculptural form that could not exist without this exact moment of intersection.

This gesture draws from the logic of my visual language, where contrast, tension, and alignment are constant forces. It’s about systems meeting chaos, digital meeting analog, rigid structure meeting expressive form.

By reducing the materials to just two panels, I strip the composition to its essence: a dialogue between parts, where interaction becomes identity.

In early 2024, a freak bubble of ultra-cold Arctic air slipped out of the jet stream and parked itself over BC’s Okanagan Lake. In doing so, it lowered temperatures to –30 °C and decimated that year’s grape yield. The cold air also killed hundreds of thousands of vines that will require replanting and about five years to return growth to pre-chill levels.

In Chardonnay, Douglas Coupland has created a series of bronze sculptures addressing 2024’s historical moment. These are unique “burn-outs” of vine heads collected from vineyards in Osoyoos, contiguous with the U.S. border. Their shapes are distinctly zoomorphic, with each piece resembling two, three, or more different animals at once, depending on the viewer. It is Coupland’s intent that when assembled, these works depict the moment when the animals on Noah’s Ark return to the world at the end of the Flood. Collectively, they form a subtle and moving statement that offers hope and beauty at the end of sadness.

Edward Burtynsky’s forthcoming project, Mining: For the Future, continues his four-decade long exploration of humanity’s complex relationship with the extraction of natural resources. Known for his painterly eye and ability to transform industrial landscapes into compositions that recall abstract paintings, Burtynsky approaches sites of immense environmental impact with both precision and lyricism. One of the primary locations that will be featured in this new body of work is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the mining of minerals including copper and cobalt, has become central to fuelling the global transition toward renewable energy. Shot using a drone, these photographs record the staggering scale of the copper mine by including evidence of human scale when viewed up close. From further back, their striking chromatic variations — swaths of green, earthy red, and oxidized blue - spread across the surface like pigments on a canvas.

Under the varnish presents the lair of painting forger, Réal Lessart. The painted installation consists of an old-fashioned living room with a painted bookcase leading through a secret door to the forger’s lair. Once on the other side of walls, the spectator can observe other visitors through various openings (paintings with hollowed-out eyes, false mirrors, etc.), interacting with Lessart in a space where time seems to stand still. Some of the paintings with robotic devices are activated to create the impression that we are in a living painting that comes to life before our eyes. These elements, along with the concealed clues, hidden entrances, mirrors and vibratory illusions of Op Art, offer visitors the experience of an investigation into the relativity of perception, highlighting the limits of the representation of reality in a grotesque, madcap universe.

In 1993, Frank Shebageget began a long-term project called Communities.

He produced a meticulous, handwritten inventory of the First Nations, Inuit and Metis communities across Canada that are in the process of reclaiming their languages, cultures and territories.

The nearly 700 names appear on tar paper, a material familiar to Shebageget, used as a house covering in his and many other Indigenous communities.

An ongoing series, Communities receives an update approximately every 10 years.

Most recently Shebageget created Communities IV (2022) while in residency at the Nordamerika Native Museum in Zurich, Switzerland.

The paintings in Condensations are the result of translating impressions and experiences in nature (looking, being with, and travelling through) to the surface of a painting, a flat space, and a sort of negotiated terrain with many factors affecting the outcome.

These images are intuitive and imaginative landscapes. They all hold a record of their evolution, made and remade till they settle into an image that makes sense subjectively.

For Evans (b 1966, Weston-Super-Mare, England, grad OCA 1989) painting is a process where material, memory, process, history, conscious and unconscious decision making, all define outcomes with the final image a space of convergence of these influences.

As Joan Mitchell says, “I’m more likely to carry my landscapes around with me.” This is accurate to Evans' personal experience. The natural textures, the light and colour, are all constant sources of inspiration and manipulating them, considering the possibilities, is an ongoing process of discovery.

Photo: LF Documentation

Failure to Contain reflects overlooked narratives of Japanese Canadian internment during the Second World War. While most histories focus on camps, my parents, like many others, lived outside them, enduring hardship while struggling independently. Their story, and those of thousands like them, deserves greater recognition. This sculpture, created in their honour, is built from bamboo, a material traditionally linked to containment but here reimagined as a vessel for memory, resilience, and quiet resistance. Strips of bamboo carry fragments of wartime newspapers, my father’s English to Japanese dictionary, and my mother’s Buddhist prayer book, forming a collage that mirrors my incomplete understanding of their lives. Repurposed bamboo window shades recall the resourcefulness of families forced to improvise when uprooted. Bound by tension, the work evokes the strain of separation and uncertainty. Its open weave embodies the failure to contain: stories, memories, and truths could never be

Presented by the Hong Kong Tourism Board

This installation expands on earlier works like Whispering Jade Bazaar (2024) and Kiosk for the Silent Traveler (2018), which took the form of fictional Chinatown curio shops. Building on my exploration of the commodification and circulation of Chinese material culture in the West, this iteration shifts focus toward Hong Kong as a historic hub of trade, migration, and craftsmanship, and its role in shaping how Chinese culture has been interpreted and consumed globally.

This architecture evokes chinoiserie follies and the pavilions staged at World’s Fairs, where culture was presented as spectacle for international audiences. Integrating items and craftworks from Hong Kong with my own ‘copies,’ I question authenticity by creating faux artifacts from everyday materials. Blurring the lines between memory and fabrication, the installation also reflects on layered stories of migration from Hong Kong to Canada, including those of my own family.

Luke Painter’s practice explores a wide range of historical and contemporary subjects in relation to pattern, ornamentation, technology and his own personal history. He creates fictional spaces that sample and purposely reimagine these subjects in surreal, humorous and narrative ways. Alex Bowron writes, "[this work] breaks down one of the fundamental elements of animation. The “Squash and Stretch” is an animator’s tool for improving lifelikeness through a contrasting change of shape, from squashed to stretched or vice versa, to make a stiff object appear supple. By presenting a frame-by-frame illustration of two classic motion studies –the bouncing ball and hydrodynamics, or the study of water in motion– Painter’s subject becomes the mechanics of production."

Photo: Jean-Michael Seminaro

Is a visual and material reflection on one of the most devastating effects of climate change: forced displacement due to extreme natural phenomena such as flooding. The work consists of fifty 3D pieces representing houses—a universal symbol of shelter, belonging, and memory. Each of these houses has been cut in half and installed either on the wall, arranged in a seemingly random manner, as if swept away by an unpredictable tide.

These fragmented houses become a powerful metaphor for rupture, submersion, and exposure. When mounted on the wall, the halves appear partially sunken into the surface, evoking a sense of immersion and partial loss—a suspended shipwreck. The chaotic arrangement reinforces this impression: there is no hierarchy or architectural logic, only a constellation of floating ruins, an unstable geography marked by the violence of nature and its aftermath.

What elevates this installation to a poetic and deeply emotional act is that each piece is intervened with oil paint

Paradis Anonyme is a constellation installation consisting of individually hand enamelled and train flattened Canadian pennies. Began in 2018, this work explores concepts of rarity, provenance, and transformation, while using the practice of water-dowsing as a creative methodology for reconnecting to forgotten family histories, interrogating the transformation of materials, and reckoning with Canada's colonial heritage. Rooted in both personal and collective narratives, this installation establishes a bridge between the esoteric and familiar, at the intersection of materiality, mysticism, and historical reflection, inviting viewers to explore multi-sensory and multi-modal means of engagement and reflection. Yen-Chao Lin (b.1983, Taiwan) is a Taipei-born Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist. Her work can be found in the collections of Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Ville de Laval, Banff Centre, and various public and private collections worldwide.

Canadian artist Zachari Logan (b. Saskatoon, 1980) works mainly with large-scale drawing, ceramics, painting and installation, evolving a visual language that explores the intersections between identity, memory and place. Employing a strategy of visual quotation, mined from place and experience, Logan re-wilds his body as a queer embodiment of nature. This narrative shift engages ideas of beauty, mortality, empirical explorations of landscape, and overlapping art-historic motifs that all underline a fundamental interconnection of the human as nature.

In Tree of Life Ditch, For Will Munro, the artist brings a variety of plant forms together in a ditch-like setting, not quite landscaped and not quite wild, where differences are worked out so that all can flourish, not unlike how Will Munro's Vazaleen club night brought the margins together on the dance floor. Although Logan and Munro never met (Munro died of brain cancer in 2010 at the age of 35) the legacy lingers on in this drawing.