Curated by Karen Kraven
Abbas Akhavan, Lili Huston-Herterich, Sukaina Kubba, Jeremy Laing, Jenine Marsh, Diyar Mayil, Marisa Portolese, Swapnaa Tamhane & Aimée Zito Lema
The exhibition brings together works that explore flowers, gardens and the acts of mourning and remembrance. Grappling with the complexities of loss and the thresholds between life and death, the works in the exhibition consider memorialization, materiality and embodiment.
“Learning to live with our dead requires a raft. Losing someone so integral to our ecosystem, losing a sense of ourselves as our whole chemistry changes-knocks us off our feet and ushers a shift in our lives, demanding a new state of balance.” 1
Prior to their arrangement, the potential of the cut flower is suspended in anticipation of being assigned meaning. Bouquets are often substitutes for words or emotion; their poetics insist on both the affirmation and fragility of life. The flower is therefore a stand-in, bridging presence and absence.
The garden is an experiential space that spills out of its boundaries and is as much about the gardener and the world around as it is about the plants and ecosystems within. Mapping possession, microcosm and macrocosm, the metaphor of the garden becomes the stage for narratives of transformation.
1 Staci Bu Shea, Solution 305: Dying Livingly, Sternberg Press, 2025.
About The Artists
Abbas Akhavan is a Montreal and Berlin based visual artist from Tehran whose practice ranges across site-specific ephemeral installations to drawing, video, sculpture, and performance. His multidisciplinary practice reflects on the relationships between place and history, attending to the geopolitical forces which define spaces.
Lili Huston-Herterich is white American-Canadian artist based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. As an artist, she is concerned with how her work emerges in relation to space, histories, and other people, and how to maintain an awareness and acknowledgement of these relations.
Sukaina Kubba is an Iraqi-born, Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist who explores narratives of cultural and material assimilation and appropriation. One of her central research projects considers rugs and other high-trade textiles as historic objects, as traveling heirlooms and artifacts, and as carriers of many lives and miles.
Jeremy Laing is a Canadian artist making objects, spaces and situations of embodiment. Utilizing material as a conduit for mimesis, draping fabrics relax like bodies, wrapped yarns enflesh ceramic “bones”, and textures become affective mirrors.
Jenine Marsh (b. 1984, Calgary AB) lives in Toronto. Engaging with themes of agency, mortality and value, her sculpture and installations have been exhibited at Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, ON (2025); the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, NY (2025); the Goldfarb Art Gallery, Toronto; Ensemble, New York (2024); Prairie, Chicago (2024); Ashley, Berlin (2024); the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver (2024); Cooper Cole, Toronto (2023); Joe Project, Montreal (2023); Gianni Manhattan, Vienna (2023); Union Pacific, London (2023); Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); Franz Kaka, Toronto (2019); Centre Clark, Montreal (2019); Entrée Gallery, Bergen (2018), and Lulu, Mexico City (2015). Marsh’s work has received funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, Partners in Art, the Chalmers Arts Fellowship, the Toronto Arts Council, and the Ontario Arts Council. Jenine received her BFA from the Alberta University of the Arts in 2007, and her MFA from the University of Guelph in 2013. She is currently a doctoral candidate at York University.
Diyar Mayil is an artist working in sculpture, installation and performance. She often works with the familiar to address issues of comfort, discomfort and the blurring of public and private contexts. She is the laureate for the Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art (2022) and the recipient of the Liz Crockford Award (2023). Her work has been supported by Canada Council for the Arts, CALQ, Conseil des arts de Montréal and has recently been shown at Whitney ISP, Articule, Circa Art Actuel and Centre Clark. She holds a BFA and MFA from Concordia University. Originally from Istanbul, she now lives and works in Montréal.
Marisa Portolese is a Canadian-Italian visual artist from Montreal whose work centers on portraiture, representations of women, and figures in nature, often informed by autobiography and cultural heritage. Through large-scale, painterly color photographs and narrative imagery, she explores identity, spectatorship, and the emotional interplay of gesture, affect, and the gaze.
Swapnaa Tamhane’s art practice is dedicated to drawing and the material histories of cotton and jute. She has an MFA in Fibres & Material Practices, Concordia University, Montreal, where she was recently an Artist-in-Residence. She has been supported by SSHRC, Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, and was an International Museum Fellow with the Kulturstiftung des Bundes in 2013. Her research extends to material culture, and with designer Rashmi Varma, she wrote SĀR: The Essence of Indian Design, Phaidon Press (2016). She has exhibited her work at Nature Morte, Delhi; articule, Montreal; Sculpture Park Jaipur; Green Art Gallery, Dubai; Victoria & Albert Museum, Dundee, Scotland; and has had solo exhibitions at Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; and Surrey Art Gallery, Surrey, British Columbia, Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA, and she has been shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award 2025, with an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Aimée Zito Lema is a Dutch-Argentinean visual artist born in Amsterdam and raised in Buenos Aires. Both research and intuition based, Zito Lema works with archival material and personal memory exploring the way events are remembered and recorded.
Tuesday – Saturday:
10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Monday (by appointment)
Closed Sunday + statutory holidays
Free Admission
