Working across painting, sculpture, video, performance, and installation, Toronto-based artist Timothy Yanick Hunter views media as a range of languages that can be drawn upon and experimented with to re-envision storytelling.

For Collapse and Incompletion, his first solo exhibition in a public museum, he is presenting a new series of installations that investigate historical material and synthesize physical and digital archives. A nod to notions of collective and diasporic memory, this exhibition sees Hunter evolve his work into new forms of multidisciplinary experimentation that respond to the space and setting of Gairloch Gardens by Lake Ontario.

Considering his artistic practice a research process, Hunter conducts rigorous research into wide-ranging sources like archives, videos, music, texts, and images. Assembling together the various archival fragments, he then uses techniques such as “referencing," “sampling," and “remixing" to demonstrate the active exploration and re-contextualization of history. His ongoing work True and Functional, originally conceived as an online audio project, is developed into a multi-channel video installation in the gallery, alongside new sculptures and fabric prints. Alternating between exploratory and didactic approaches, Hunter questions the assumed neutrality of dominant narratives and reflects on speculation as a strategy for decolonization.

Collapse and Incompletion is commissioned by Oakville Galleries with the support of Partners in Art.