Bonny Poon / Conditions, Toronto
The Canadian art landscape is ever-changing. Places + Spaces keeps you informed of established and up-and-coming exhibition venues across the country including museums, galleries, artist-run centres, and more. This month, we hear from Bonny Poon, director of Bonny Poon / Conditions in Toronto.
What is the history and mandate of your gallery?
Kévin Blinderman, Promise I’ll Be Kind,2025, installation view at Bonny Poon / Conditions
The gallery was founded in 2017 in Paris’ 13th arrondissement by me and my former partner, Nathaniel Monjaret. Our vision was to present an intergenerational, international program of artists and cultural figures – emerging and established – united by a bold, transgressive (often comic) sensibility. The gallery operated out of a one-room apartment on the 26th floor of a residential brutalist tower. People never knew if Bonny Poon was a fiction or a real person. My own artwork dressed up this ambiguity. I made videos and staged social choreographies that framed the gallery’s behind-the-scenes as both plot and propaganda.
Produzentin, So Fragile (Proddy in the Potty), 2025, installation view at Bonny Poon / Conditions
After closing in Paris at the end of 2019 and fully quitting the art world, I reopened in 2023 in Toronto’s Chinatown. I added the appendage “/ Conditions” partly to reflect the circumstances that allowed for its reopening. (Read: my own uncertain relationship to art-making, survival, and sustainability.) “I would come back only on these conditions” became a mantra. When you have the art curse, it’s tempting to just do what you know – which is to destroy your life for it. But more essentially, the name Conditions foregrounds what art, at its best, does. Art doesn’t just reflect existing conditions; it changes them. It reshapes the world around it, shifting what’s possible.
In this second iteration, my scope has expanded. I now commission specific works, often working closely with the artists over several years. I also promote a broader range of artistic activity, routinely off-site – including land art, performance, site-specificity, parties, lectures, and film.
What’s a highlight of the neighbourhood where the gallery is located?
Sam Lipp, Camp As Paradigm, 2024, installation view at Bonny Poon / Conditions
We are on the border of Chinatown beside the AGO and OCAD U. It’s great to be central and close to the city’s art school. We try to support the next generation of artists and curators however we can. Obviously, the food here is incredible and convenient for dinners. St. Patrick Street also housed the studios of lots of artists in the 1970s – including Ron Giii.
What’s your favourite part of running an art gallery?Â
Alli Melanson, Make your home in Me, as I make mine in You, 2024-2025, installation view at Bonny Poon / Conditions
Proving reality wrong. Making the impossible happen. All the magic of art. It’s also spiritual to meet collectors who are genuinely interested in art – for the right reasons. More concretely: collaborating with artists, making exhibitions, amplifying their voice, knowing that my work directly enables them to live.
How do you find out about new artists?
Simon Shim-Sutcliffe, A Suitcase Full of Soil, 2024, asphalt, bricks, chicken wire, cinder blocks, compost, composted manure, concrete, copper, copper pipes, iron, mortar, moss, mulch, oil barrels, osb wood, painters canvas, parging cement, plastic, plumbing pipes, plywood, recycled wood, road signs, seeds, shingles, steel, tarpaulin, tin sheeting, tree branches, twine, weeds, wild flower seeds (Bonny Poon / Conditions site-specific project in Toronto’s east end)
The internet, word-of-mouth, my team.
Where do you see yourself in five years?
Keeping the business strong while staying real. And opening an art school.
What excites you about your upcoming exhibitions?Â
Bruce LaBruce, Slava Posing for Rainer Fetting, Berlin, 1998, film photograph
We recently announced Bruce LaBruce as a recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. We are presenting his first exhibition in Toronto in a decade along with Zoe Barcza, who is originally from Toronto and now based in Los Angeles. She’s a visionary artist we’ve worked with since day one, and this marks her first solo exhibition in the city. It’s an intergenerational pairing. Both artists are iconoclastic, subversive, and represent the body in visceral, reality-shifting ways. It will be a terrifying and tender show. All the feels.
This summer, we’ll project Simon Shim-Sutcliffe‘s new film, Zone, on a sailboat on Lake Ontario.
In September, London-based painter Megan Rooney will have her debut at the gallery. She previously had a solo show at MOCA in 2020 during the pandemic. Also in September, our project space Potty will premiere a collaborative video work by Wendy Whiteway and Julia Hendrickson. The piece includes a shot-by-shot remake of the dance scene from Atom Egoyan’s Exotica, interrupted – with care. (Full disclosure: Wendy and Julia recruited me to hold the camera for half the footage. We see this excavating and inverting of roles within the gallery’s social infrastructure as a recurring motif of Conditions.)