Opening Artist Reception July 23rd, 6-8pm
Meet the Artists
Kirk Gower
Kirk’s work is grounded in human experience, whether exploring identity markers, his own queerness, or the abstract emotions of love, loss, and anguish. Using traditional painting techniques, he weaves these narratives into sumptuous, highly rendered oil paintings. He then adds various decorative elements to convey meanings and emotions he associates with the figure or objects within a still life painting. The result is often dreamlike or surrealist imagery. Though typically painted in a realistic style, his compositions are deliberately constructed, frequently incorporating his own reference images collected over decades and reassembling them into new forms.
Kirk is equally captivated by the very substance of his work, oil paint. A highly technical painter, he explores how variations in style elicit different responses from the viewer. He is drawn to the tension between realism and artifice, fascinated by the push and pull along this invisible boundary. At the heart of his practice lies a reminder: what the viewer sees is an entirely fabricated composition, a deliberate construction rather than a depiction of reality.
Nicole Sleeth
I am interested in the differences between inner emotional worlds and outer public presence: how we experience ourselves versus how our selves are perceived by others. Which is true? Either? Both? Or neither at all? Truth and its unveiling are central to the work. For example, when painting the female figure, I consider the charged and gendered history of the muse in Western art history. It is paradoxical that in the classical female nude, a woman’s identity is simultaneously idealized and erased. And yet who is the viewer, and who is the viewed? As a woman and a painter, I am both.
I find freedom and peace through solitude in the natural landscape of my home in Newfoundland. In the barrens, in the forest, on rocky shores, I become invisible, unseen; the ocean does not care about me. Escaping all notice grants me the mental space to examine my relationship with place, to delve into worlds unseen, and reconcile my experiences and emotions. My landscape paintings are not a record of the location they represent, but rather an exploration of my emotional state while there.
Benjamin/Babe Siegl
My creative practice is grounded in painting, drawing, and animation interwoven with digital methods of image production and manipulation. My paintings are concerned with a contemporary queer identity complicated by historical influence, mass image culture, digitality, and the evolution of eroticism. I am interested in points of friction, where the iconography of power has become suffused with modern concepts of nostalgia, sexual liberation, and masculinity. I am equally optimistic about the empowering potential of fantasy and creative play, ideas I seek to embrace in my practice and present to audiences alike.
Marius Larose
Marius Larose is a trans artist from the Mauricie region (Nitaskinan) in Quebec, whose practice is rooted in painting while incorporating two-dimensional and three-dimensional installation elements. Their work revolves around the notion of place, exploring the sensitive and symbolic relationships we maintain with the spaces around us.
The artist is interested in how these places influence our perceptions and personal narratives. Their works often feature a blending of architectural structures and bodily forms, painted in acrylic using techniques reminiscent of watercolor. Materials intersect, overlap, seep into one another, or float on the surface, creating a dynamic interplay of depth, transparency, and texture.
Their work gives rise to alternative spaces that evoke both memory and imagination, offering open-ended readings in which each viewer can project their own experience.
Nicholas Tay
Growing up as a Chinese immigrant in Canada, I learned to see myself through Western media and found myself lacking. I was too small, too quiet, too un-masculine, foreign and undesirable. The West, with its muscular heroes and celebration of individual emotional power, was seductive in its promise of visibility and agency.
To belong felt like a bargain: freedom in exchange for your truth.
These works hold that tension. Rendered in stark monochrome and wrapped in saturated cultural pattern, the body becomes a site where assimilation and cultural identity press against each other in transformative friction. At times the garment reads as armor; at others, as skin. Abstraction interrupts like doubt, or like history insisting on its presence.