Upcoming exhibitions

Connor Fogal | Emerald Bay at the Front Door Gallery

Beginning January 15, 2024

Connor Fogal paints a mural of flowers with his mouthEmerald Bay by Connor Fogal is an expansive mural project that will be installed in the Front Door Gallery, beginning January 15, 2024. Visit the site and watch the artist paint.

Connor Fogal is a portrait and mural artist from Reno, Nevada. Fogal was born with Cerebral Palsy, which affects his physical mobility and speech. With a painting career that spans 20 years, Fogal uses a head-pointer paintbrush to create elaborate mural projects and has been commissioned to paint at Options Veterinary Hospital, the Historic Lake Mansion, and for private commission. His artistic influences include Edward Hopper and Vincent Van Gogh.

The Counter/Self

February 29 through June 1, 2024

Photo from exhibit of person standing above a mountainous landscape looking out

Image: Meryl McMaster, My Destiny is Entwined With Yours, from the series As Immense as the Sky, 2019, chromogenic print. Courtesy of the artist, Stephen Bulger Gallery, and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain.

To a certain extent, every self is performative—a cast of characters we can summon or mold to serve our needs as we face the world. We each contain potential multitudes that can express or withhold different sides of ourselves, adapt to specific contexts, determine or respond to a boundless range of human interactions. Both individual and collective identities are formed by inner drives and outside pressures, relationships and constraints, nurture and oppression, dreams and fears.

Navigating the complexities of selfhood, agency, and representation, THE COUNTER/SELF brings together a group of artists who create and embody imaginative alter egos to examine, perform and subvert identity constructs and politics. Through the use of make-up and elaborate costumes, 2Fik, Adriana Chavez, Helio Eudoro, Julius Poncelet Manapul, Meryl McMaster, Sasha Shevchenko, Adrian Stimson, Stacey Tyrell, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory and Jamie Griffiths transform their own appearance and stage layered photographic, video, mixed media, and sculptural scenes that destabilize viewers’ presumed realities and points of reference to expose prejudices with regards to gender, race, ethnicity, and nationhood.

Shaped by personal and communal histories entwined within the artists’ life experiences, their counter/selves bring forward irreverent perspectives that disrupt enshrined national narratives, cultural legacies and social expectations. Sometimes flamboyant, sometimes enigmatic, these characters reveal the fallacies of dominant discourses and counteract their harmful sways. Probing power structures, asserting belonging, or obscuring presence, the counter/selves are invoked to reclaim space or to protect the vulnerable. In all their incarnations, they epitomize resilience, resistance and renewal.

Curated by Mona Filip. The circulation of this exhibition is organized by the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Grid-Body-Place

June 25–August 3, 2024

Photo from painting in exhibit

Image: Candace Garlock, ORNAinpink, viscosity linocut print, 2012

Candace Nicol Garlock relies on an array of mediums in her work. The coalescence of printmaking techniques, painting, photography, and sculpture demonstrate the artist’s appreciation of the interconnectedness of everything. This retrospective exhibition will address Garlock’s early work and her experiments with grids in her practice. It will demonstrate the multitude of ways that the artist depicts the body in her work, either figuratively or conceptually, and will ultimately highlight the artist’s expansive practice and impact, foreground relationships, interconnectedness, and an artist’s urgent need to create in community.

Resilience: A Sansei Sense of Legacy

September 9, 2024 through November 15, 2024

Image of paper strung together and hung from the ceiling against a white background.In 1942, in response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law Executive Order 9066. The law ordered the forced imprisonment of all Japanese Americans living on the west coast of the United States, which has the second largest population of Japanese people living outside of Japan.

In the years following the order’s retraction at the end of WWII, expatriate Japanese families and individuals were forced to come to terms with lost property, the shame and indignation of incarceration, and the task of re-integration into a society that had expelled them. After their release from the incarceration camps that dotted the American West and Midwest during the war, Japanese Americans used the phrase Shikata ga nai— it cannot be helped— and the word gaman —to persevere and stay silent— to speak to their resilience against the losses they incurred at the behest of Roosevelt’s order.

Told from the point of view of Sansei (third generation) Japanese Americans, Resilience—A Sansei Sense of Legacy is an exhibition of eight artists whose work reflects on the effect of EO9066 as it resonated from generation to generation. While several of the artists in Resilience employ traditional Japanese methods in the construction of their work, others use iconography relating to Japanese culture as a jumping-off point for personal explorations on the subject of the incarceration camps. Each in their own way, the artists in this exhibition express moments of deeply felt pain and reluctant acceptance, emotions which were often withheld by their elders. Co-curated by artist Jerry Takigawa and Gail Enns, Resilience was conceived to serve as a catalyst to cultivate social dialog and change around the issues of racism, hysteria and economic exploitation still alive in America today. The artists featured in Resilience were selected because of their personal connection to the subject matter, because their work is well respected within the Japanese American community as well as within the art world, and because of their activism on the subject of incarceration camps.