Migration, power and memory

The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery celebrates its 35th anniversary this year. Marking this milestone, The Power Plant is kicking off 2022 three thought-provoking solo exhibitions by international and Canadian artists. Spanning the fields of photography, video, installation and drawing, each exhibition explores the intricacies of human relationships with the land, raising timely questions about our lived experiences of migration, power and memory. On until May 1, the exhibitions will be accompanied by a program of events, talks and tours - including a Sunday Scene with Nehal El-Hadi on February 20.

Toronto-based Canadian artist Sandra Brewster presents By Way of Communion as both an indoor installation and an outdoor sculptural piece. DENSE is a large-scale installation of photo-based gel transfers depicting an arboreal landscape, installed directly onto the gallery’s walls. These gel transfers contain scratches and ridges that are reminiscent of Brewster’s early work and reference the complex and layered experiences of Caribbean immigrants arriving in Canada. Outside The Power Plant, Brewster has completed her first public sculpture, A Place to Put Your Things. Part of ArtworxTO, the sculpture is a functional swing set with a seat forming a couple’s kiss. 

Making her North American solo exhibition debut, The Power Plant welcomes Swiss-Haitian-Finnish artist Sasha Huber. Featuring works that utilize performance, photography and film, Huber’s YOU NAME IT comprises a decade of her artworks made in response to the cultural and political activist campaign “Demounting Louis Agassiz” – a project that interrogates the racist legacy of influential naturalist and glaciologist Louis Agassiz. Huber’s work reimagines what it means to remember, and the way in which we memorialize people.

London-based Danish-Scottish artist Shona Illingworth is also making her solo exhibition debut in Canada at The Power Plant. Illingworth’s exhibition, Topologies of Air, examines how governance, surveillance and weaponization are infiltrating our interior worlds, beyond national borders, giving way to new forms of dominance and colonization. Illingworth uncovers how emerging power and knowledge structures could have a catastrophic effect on our relationship to the natural world. To accompany the exhibition, she is releasing a new book of commissioned essays titled Topologies of Air – with the foreword written by The Power Plant’s Director & Artistic Director, Gaëtane Verna.

Exhibitions by Sasha Huber, Shona Illingworth and Sandra Brewster are on view now until May 1,  at The Power Plant Contemporary Gallery.

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