Chris Glabb: Roadkill Paintings (Found Series)

Untitled (Roadkill Deer on Rainbows) by Chris Glabb

Chris Glabb: Roadkill Paintings (Found Series)

May 12 – July 4, 2025
Lalande + Doyle Exhibition Space
Shenkman Arts Centre, Ottawa

Roadkill Paintings (Found Series) combines found images with found materials to present familiar depictions of violence. The repeated imagery of dead animals should disturb, but instead slips easily into one’s field of vision, revealing a growing desensitization to violent content. In an era where horror films are increasingly gory and videos of real-world atrocities circulate online without warning, violence represents both entertainment and news. The grotesque has become banal. Just as one slows down to gawk at roadkill on the highway, people now experience others’ suffering with morbid curiosity and indifference.

All the images in this series were sourced online, primarily from social media, underscoring the harrowing accessibility of violence in digital spaces. The use of found materials as ‘ready-made’ patterns gestures toward the unsettling ease with which violence can be aestheticized, rendered palatable, or beautiful.

The series draws a parallel between the brutalization of animals and the systemic mistreatment of marginalized communities, particularly Queer and Indigenous peoples, who are often dehumanized under the guise of “traditional values” and far-right ideologies. The dystopian nature of a society that accepts the dissection and disposal of animals as a mere byproduct of interconnectedness demands re-evaluation: is this violence incidental or foundational?

Roadkill Paintings (Found Series) invites viewers to interrogate the content they consume and the systems that produce it. This series asks them to reconsider their own relationship to violence and beauty.

Improper Burial III, Improper Burial IV by Chris Glabb

This exhibition was made possible by the Arts Ottawa (formerly Arts Network Ottawa) ARTicipate Endowment Fund.

About the Artist

Chris Glabb (b. 2000) is an emerging Métis artist who received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Ottawa. His work, rooted in printmaking and painting, examines cultural capital, that is, how references and images function as currency that grants access, legitimacy, and belonging. Through irony and lowbrow referentiality, Chris aims to recontextualize existing imagery to critique hierarchy and navigate intersectional Queerness and Indigenous identities. www.chrisglabb.com

About the Shenkman Arts Centre

The centre is located in the east Ottawa community of Orléans and offers programs and services in both English and French.

We like to say this is “where art comes to life” because behind the doors of our two theatres, seven galleries and 17 studios – in the halls, lobbies and even on the walls – there is plenty of creativity stirring. The centre houses these activities within specialized spaces for hands-on instruction, creation and presentation of the visual, performing, literary and media arts and unique spaces for receptions and special events.

Operated by the City of Ottawa, this diversity of programs and activities is attributed to a unique collaboration with the centre’s Resident Arts Partners: Arts Network Ottawa, Gloucester Pottery School, MIFO (Mouvement d’implication francophone d’Orléans), Ottawa School of Art–Orléans Campus, and Ottawa School of Theatre. The centre is also home to Resident Company Tara Luz Danse and ARTicipate, a one-of-a-kind endowment fund that supports innovative programming at the centre.

Shenkman Arts Centre
245 Centrum Boulevard
Ottawa, ON K1E 0A1
shenkmanarts.ca
shenkmanartscentre@ottawa.ca
613-580-2787

Accessibility:
Shenkman Arts Centre is partially accessible. For more information, visit shenkmanarts.ca/en/accessibility.