Toronto visit

Tomorrow is Another Day, indigo in linen damask, applique, hand stitching, 2024

I’m in Toronto this week.  I arrived on Friday and spent  two nights (Friday and Saturday) at the Gladstone House on Queen West.  I was able to do this fancy thing because part of the Gladstone House Award that I won last fall was one night's sleep in the room where my work is hanging for one year.  (The second night was half price).  My linen wall piece will be in room 309 until November.  After those two nights, I moved to the east end of the city where my son lives with his family.   

Our daughter April lives in the west end of the city, and on that first Saturday she took me to several commercial galleries.  First up was the Patel Brown gallery where there was a group show What We Carry.  The handmade washi paper sculptures of Japanese-Canadian artist, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka resonated with me.  She made sewn boulders and 3-dimensional wall pieces from lino block printed paper that she had made herself.   

At the same gallery, we saw some pieces by Swapnaa Tamhane 

Bird's Eye mirror embroidery on dyed silk by Swapnaa Tamhane

Fence watercolour on paper  by Swapnaa Tamhane

I feel so lucky to have been able to see these inspirational, quilt-like pieces that reference place (her ancestral homeland) so eloquently.  

We visited the Clint Roenisch gallery next and I saw Leif Low-Beer's solo exhibition of naive sculptures and paintings done in pastels and bright colours in a variety of mediums.  

S.E.T.M. 1 2025 

In the Daniel Faria gallery, Jean-Francois Lauda's solo exhibition,  Some Exceeding Twelve Minutes, was on display. All the paintings had this as their name, differentiated by a number. 

S.E.T.M. 5     2025

Jean-Francois Lauda is a practicing musician, and the title, Some Exceeding Twelve Minutes refers to the time that performances of musical pieces stretches to be longer than usual or expected.  I liked that time is considered a material in these paintings.  The artist says that he enjoys "staying with something long enough to understand what it's doing or undoing".  

I tried to understand why Lauda's work resonated with me so much, and I think it is because his paintings are similar to my own work (in textiles).  Like my work, his paintings a) are nearly monochromatic and b) there are large areas of 'empty space filled with textural marks".

Window   2017. Oil on canvas 

The last gallery that we visited on Saturday was MOCA - the Museum of Contemporary Art.  I had looked forward to viewing the solo shows of Jessica Stockholder and Justin Ming Yong, but was not as impressed as I had hoped to be by them.  However, Margaux Williamson's extensive exhibition entitled Shoes, books, hands, buildings and cars was really good. There were a lot of paintings, several of them dated 2025.  Most were very large.  On large neutral backgrounds, she represents the familiar interiors and backyards of her life in a diaristic way.  Her compositions explore abstraction, a variety of perspectives, unfinished areas, and contemporary dailiness.  

Red Carpet (collection of the art gallery of Ontario) 2024

I've followed Margaux Williamson's career for a while, beginning from when I read Sheila Heti’s 2010 novel grounded in their personal friendship, How Should a Person Be?   However, this is the first time that I have been able to view her paintings in real life and it was astounding to be face to face with her masterly technique and the large scale of the paintings.  

The final artist I will speak about is my grand daughter, Suvi, age 4.  She used finger paint on finger painting paper in these morning paintings about the sun, but (such a rebel) she used a paint brush to apply the paint.  (except for that red finger-painted circle in the painting on the upper left.)