James Rollo: Surplus Value

Untitled (can I get that for you?), 2018

James Rollo
Surplus Value

May 15 – July 3, 2025
assemblage, Toronto

James Rollo is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator currently based in Toronto, Canada and London, UK.

Surplus Value is a selection of old and new works that playfully responds to the site of assemblage as a storefront window and its physical environment. Surplus Value continues James Rollo’s practice of exploring methodologies of queering objects and spaces by challenging people’s expectations of said objects. The resulting anti-objects, visual glitches, and experiential anomalies are for the casual passersby to encounter and question what, exactly, has happened to them—are these objects of desire and utility, too, still just “passing?”. By queering this merchandise and having their identities shifted when pushed and extended into art objects, how will they be contemplated and looked at differently?

For more information:
Instagram: @jamesthian
Website: jamesrollo.format.com

The amount of non-alcoholic beer I had to buy is shameful, 2017/19

assemblage
assemblage is a public-facing storefront space dedicated to the exhibition of emerging and established artists. assemblage embraces “liveliness”: our research and activities consider questions such as: how are we interconnected with our environment, communities, and non-human ecosystems? Knowledge sharing and dissemination take the form of workshops, exhibitions, publications, and seminars. Our goal is to remain fluid as we embrace complex issues, acknowledge entanglements, and foster inter- and cross-disciplinary practices.

assemblage
2015 Dundas Street West
Toronto, ON
assemblage-gallery.com

Accessibility:
assemblage is accessible. As a storefront gallery, works are viewed from the street.

assemblage acknowledges the ancestral territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabeg and the Huron-Wendat, who are the original owners and custodians of this land. We also acknowledge the Métis, Inuit, and Indigenous urban communities who share these lands.