Cleah Fast & Nicky Hiscox: All the Things You Miss

Cleah Fast, I Was Here and You Were Next to Me, 2025, 36 x 36 inches, Acrylic on canvas

Cleah Fast & Nicky Hiscox: All the Things You Miss

November 8 – December 3, 2026
Meet the Artists: November 8, 11am – 5pm
NOTL Contemporary Gallery, Niagara-on-the-Lake

In a culture shaped by constant distraction and fuelled by an attention economy, All the Things You Miss explores what passes by unnoticed: the fleeting moments, overlooked details and shared experiences that quietly shape our lives and connect us to one another.

Inspired by a reversal of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, or frequency illusions—a cognitive bias in which we begin to notice something more often once it has caught our attention—the exhibition asks: What happens to all the things we don’t notice? Through a research-creation based approach, the work poses questions rather than offering answers. What keeps us connected to someone in their absence? What makes a fleeting moment unforgettable? How can we become outsiders in our own memories?

Nicky Hiscox, Olympia, 2026, 30 x 40 inches, Acrylic on canvas

Over the past year, Cleah Fast and Nicky Hiscox have independently explored memory, nostalgia, and intimacy through their respective artistic practices, while navigating periods of significant personal change. Both artists have found solace in depicting birds, more specifically, Homing Pigeons, as representations of memory. Historically used by humans to communicate across vast distances, pigeons have come to symbolize connection, direction, and the instinct to return home. Often overlooked in everyday life, they invite us to reconsider what we dismiss and miss, what we remember, and what continues to guide us back home.

All the Things You Miss honours the overlooked and the imperfect, inviting viewers to reflect on the details that make up a memory, the experiences that bring us together, and the things we may only recognize once they are gone. Through two distinct yet interconnected artistic perspectives, the exhibition offers a space to pause, pay attention, and find familiarity in the unexpected.

Out of all the things you miss, we really hope you don’t miss this.

Cleah Fast, To Have and To Hold, 2026, 36 x 48 inches, Acrylic on canvas

About Cleah Fast

Based in Niagara and working across the GTA, Cleah Fast received her BFA from Brock University in Studio Art, and is a current participant in the Remix Project Round 21.0.

Cleah Fast is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, photography, projection mapping and installation. Rooted in a practice of close observation and a curiosity about lived experience, Fast creates emotionally charged work that examines intimacy, place and the invisible energy exchanges that shape how we move through the world. Through vivid colour, expressive line and dream-like compositions, Fast explores the tension between private experience and public space with attention to energy, memory and human connection embedded within oneric environments.

Instagram @cleahfast

Nicky Hiscox, Bone Bird, 2026, 40 x 30 inches, Oil on canvas

About Nicky Hiscox

Nicky Hiscox is a multidisciplinary artist based in the Niagara Region whose practice treats art making as a process of research, experimentation and discovery. Working across painting, etching, sculpture and digital media, Hiscox draws on her evolving relationships with computers and technology to examine the texture, tensions and contradictions of contemporary post digital life. At the centre of her practice is an interest in what goes unnoticed. Hiscox draws attention to the negative spaces embedded within everyday routines-spaces so familiar they often disappear. Rather than treating the surrounding environments as empty air, she considers it an active presence, a boundary, pressure and form that gives shape to intimate moments and defines the relationships between bodies, objects and surroundings.

Instagram @___postdigital

NOTL Contemporary Gallery
1425 Lakeshore Rd Upper
Niagara-on-the-lake, ON, L0S 1J0
Instagram @notl.gallery

Accessibility: NOTL Contemporary Gallery is not accessible.