Art Toronto 2023

Sonny Assu

Sonny Assu (Ligwilda’xw of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nations) has been recognized for his mashups of Indigenous iconography and popular culture. Through a variety of mediums including sculpture, painting, prints, large-scale installations and interventions Assu’s work maintains a profound connection to past traditions while speaking to pertinent issues of our time.

Assu’s work is included in numerous major public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Museum of Anthropology (Vancouver), and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Bobbie Burgers

Bobbie Burgers is interested in the process of decay, transformation, and metamorphosis in nature. With a distinct style that merges abstraction with representation in increasing degrees, her work brings together instinctive compositions while revealing her precise powers of observation. Remarkable for their compositional rhythms, bold coloration, and sweeping gestural brushstrokes, Burgers’ paintings bring alive the fundamental quest to express something personal, subjective and emotive, in a poetic, abstract way.

Kim Dorland

Kim Dorland’s practice reflects a fascination with the enigmatic Canadian landscape as it comes into contact with contemporary urban experience. The psychological atmosphere represented by Dorland is confrontational and hallucinatory, disrupting conventional ideas that the natural world is a place of solace and contemplation. Using a dense matrix of intense colours, delirious textures, and passionate painterly touch, Dorland brings a paradoxical sense of displacement in which the artist’s relationship with nature is simultaneously one of awe and fear. In parallel with this, fragments of contemporary urban life materialize themselves in the form of ghostly figures and graffiti remnants. It is through these dueling representations of the landscape that Kim Dorland has created a body of work endowed with an emotional charge whose potential far exceeds the formal confines of the canvas.

Angela Grossmann

For nearly four decades, Angela Grossmann has been recognized for her relentless probe into the complexities of identity, gender politics, and displacement. The subjects of her paintings, photo-based collages, and mixed-media works largely reference the female form, culled from a vast archive of images collected by the artist that includes art-historical references, postcards, and found snapshots.

Angela Grossmann lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.

Adad Hannah

Adad Hannah explores historically trenchant themes through elaborate bodies of work that include installation, video, and photography. Inspired by the historical practice of tableaux vivants (translated as “living pictures”), Hannah’s overall practice invokes the durational form of early cinema, while also making reference to early photography by mimicking paintings at a time when it was the very goal of photography to do so. Time occupies a prominent place in Hannah’s production, forged by a lasting interest in temporality and its complex relationship with photography and video. Hannah adds to this history by bridging, or blurring, the divide between the tableau in photography and its originating form as living, i.e., live picture. 

Shawn Hunt

Shawn Hunt is a Heiltsuk artist born in Waglisla (Bella Bella), British Columbia. Hunt’s practice is directly informed by his Scottish, French and First Nations background and the visual culture and traditions that accompany it. He works with the traditional Northwest Coast design principle, known as formline, to create abstract, surreal, and sculptural artworks based on ancestral Heiltsuk Cosmology that often reference contemporary aboriginal life. Hunt is always seeking to push the boundaries of the art form, often combining non-traditional ideas with innovative uses of materials and motifs in his work. 

Jack Kenna

Jack Kenna’s artistic practice extends fluidly across painting and sculpture, often incorporating found images, objects, and text. Drawing partially from his material surroundings, his compositions are highly considered and incorporate unconventional juxtapositions, uncanny backgrounds and close-up cropping of objects of subjective and sentimental value. Kenna also makes great use of the extensive cache of online imagery to develop a vocabulary of motifs that are constantly appearing, morphing, and reappearing in his practice. Kenna’s works incorporate a broad range of techniques allowing him to use varied methods of representation. As a young artist, he is comfortable merging imagery from the history of still life painting with the archive of cell phone photography, allowing him to create works that convey the paradoxes inherent in the contemporary experience.

Rob Nicholls

Rob Nicholls’ landscapes embody the transcendental effect of the natural world on the human psyche. Through textured brushstrokes, illuminated colours, and loose washes, his paintings are a synthesis of flora, fauna and geological forms that are charged with atmospheric conditions. These images emerge from his imagination and memories of a childhood surrounded by the lush vegetation of Vancouver Island.

His ethereal landscapes evoke visions of worlds that are beyond the physical and enter the realm of the subjective imagination. Expansive and kaleidoscopic, Nicholls’ works do not present a single spatial or temporal perspective; rather each of his environments offers multiple qualities of light, from the vibrant colours of dawn to the muted tones of dusk.

Ben Reeves

Ben Reeves is known for his sumptuous use of paint in compositions that deftly explore the relationship between abstraction and depiction. His work is actively engaged with the theory of painting, raising questions about the authenticity of imagery, while remaining deceptively traditional. At first glance, many of his works appear to borrow generously from 19th-century realism, yet they are often meticulously conceptual. Reeves’ work continually asserts that the painted image is a vocabulary of brushstrokes, a culturally understood visual language. Dominated by thick daubs of oil paint, Reeves’ paintings command a physical presence with their relief-like impasto surfaces.