Christina Foisy: While Ghosts Still Hover

Sacrifice (2023) by Christina Foisy

Christina Foisy: While Ghosts Still Hover

September 25 – 29, 2024
Opening and Artist Book Launch: September, 26, 2024 7pm-9pm
Show Gallery, Toronto

Immerse yourself in Christina Foisy’s collage installation, While Ghosts Still Hover, an exploration into the haunting worlds of familial hoarding, postpartum suicide, and disenfranchised grief. While Ghosts Still Hover brings light to the often-hidden subjects, frequently shielded from public view and silenced by stigma and shame. Christina Foisy’s exhibit masterfully combines visual poetry, collage, assemblage, and painting to explore these difficult histories ethically and creatively.

The installation offers a space where postpartum suicide and hoarding are expressed not as spectacles but as tangible languages of grief, allowing for a raw and ethical exploration. Raising questions about our existence between material and immaterial realms, Foisy invites us to engage with the ghosts that linger in the objects we struggle to release.

Energy (2023) by Christina Foisy

Foisy’s exhibition ventures beyond the conventional portrayal of hoarding as disorder, reimagining it instead as a productive form of loss and a means to bring absence into presence. Her creative process involves digital documentation and artistic manipulation of hoarded materials through collage and poetry. She presents an intimate archive of accumulated objects, each reflecting unrealized dreams and the promise of radical hope amidst the unresolved. The concept of ‘home’ is transformed into a palimpsest of questions about how we dwell in layers of memory and loss.

Love Recovery (2023) by Christina Foisy

About the Artist

Christina Foisy (she/her) is a white, settler, Neurodivergent poet, collage, and sound artist based in Toronto / Tkaronto (Treaty 13). With a background in Creative Writing, Gender Studies, and Health Humanities, including a PhD in Mad Studies, her artistic practice serves as a means of grappling with the unspeakable and the uncertain. Motivated by personal experiences of grief stemming from her mother’s postpartum suicide and her father’s hoarding, Foisy began transforming ephemera from the hoard into collages, finding beauty in the act of re-membering. Her writing and collages have been featured in literary journals and supported by grants from the Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council. Learn more about her research and creative endeavours at www.christinafoisy.com @seefoisy

Land Acknowledgement

Christina Foisy is a white settler of Irish and French ancestry who is privileged to share the land and waters covered by Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit. She currently resides and practices her craft on the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. She feels immense gratitude for this land and its people. She is committed to learn about Indigenous history and culture, to build community and to support land sovereignty, traditional healing and climate justice movements.

About Show Gallery

The Show Gallery is a community-run non-profit gallery dedicated to showcasing works by disabled artists and those with lived experience of the mental health system.

Show Gallery
978 Queen West
Toronto, ON M6J 1H1
Email: theshowgallery978@gmail.com
Phone: 647-859-9993

Facebook @christinafoisy | The Show Gallery 978
Instagram @seefoisy | @theshowgallery

Accessibility:
The Show Gallery is partially accessible. Washrooms are gender-neutral and down a flight of stairs. For more information, contact Show Gallery.

Made possible by the generous support from the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council (literary arts)

Image descriptions:
1. Lightbox collage with a vintage photograph of the artist’s father sitting on a couch with the receipt superimposed over it. The word sacrifice is handwritten in the corner with some scribbles. The main colours are oranges and blues.
2. Abstract collage combining energetic freehand drawing with sharp chaotic lines and found paper. The main colours are reds, pinks and yellows.
3. Collage with black and white photo booth photos of the artist’s parents superimposed over a love poem written by the artist’s father. The words “Love” and “Recovery” are visible over the palimpsest paper.