Fall/Winter 2026-2027 Exhibitions at The Power Plant

The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery opens its fall 2026 exhibition season this October, bringing together a variety of practices by artists exploring place, identity, ecology, and the worlds that connect us.

Zadie Xa and Benito Mayor Vallejo, detail of Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything, 2025. Courtesy the artists and Thaddaeus Ropac. Photo: Eva Herzog.

Zadie Xa with Benito Mayor Vallejo
Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything

October 24, 2026 – March 21, 2027

In her first major exhibition in Toronto, Zadie Xa presents an immersive installation created with longtime collaborator, artist Benito Mayor Vallejo. Expansive and multilayered, the exhibition combines a range of media—including a sound installation, a hand-painted mural of saturated twilight colours, and delicate bronze sculptures, co-authored by both artists —with intimate and large-scale paintings by Xa that often incorporate textile panels evoking traditional Korean patchwork quilting.

The exhibition is organized and developed in partnership with Esker Foundation, Calgary, and PHI, Montréal.

Sharon Lockhart, still from WINDWARD, © Sharon Lockhart, 2025. Co-commissioned and co-produced by Shorefast/Fogo Island Arts, The Vega Foundation, and the National Gallery of Canada, with the support of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin.

Sharon Lockhart
Fogo

October 24, 2026 – March 21, 2027

For their annual collaboration, The Vega Foundation and The Power Plant are thrilled to present Fogo, artist Sharon Lockhart’s most recent body of work, created over four summers on Fogo Island in Newfoundland. The exhibition features Fogo Island Portrait Studio, 2025, a series of photographs of young residents of the island, alongside WINDWARD, 2025, a film in which the artist carefully observes the island’s geography, and directs its youth in play amid its striking, vast landscape.

WINDWARD is co-commissioned and co-produced by Shorefast/Fogo Island Arts, The Vega Foundation, and the National Gallery of Canada, with the support of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

Yuyan Wang, still from Green Grey Black Brown, 2024. Courtesy the artist.

Owner of a Lonely Heart
Haig Aivazian, Stephanie Comilang, Alia Farid, Hope Pearl Strickland and Yuyan Wang

October 24, 2026 – March 21, 2027

In an extension of their annual collaboration, The Power Plant and The Vega Foundation also present Owner of a Lonely Heart, an 80-minute program of recent moving image works by contemporary artists. The works trace the paths of raw materials drawn from the earth, transformed into products, and circulated by waterways.

Fogo and Owner of a Lonely Heart are organized and developed by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and The Vega Foundation. Curated by Julia Paoli, Director and Curator, The Vega Foundation, with Kate Whiteway, Assistant Curator, The Vega Foundation, in dialogue with the curatorial team at The Power Plant.

Smokestack Commission Program: Sami Tsang

October 24, 2026 – March 21, 2027

Marking the inaugural Smokestack Commission Program, What We Carry Forward by mixed-media artist Sami Tsang is a site-specific large-scale ink mural inspired by childhood shadow puppetry and populated by tiny porcelain figurines of girls. Through this imagined world of play, protection and collective movement, Tsang considers the quieter inheritances passed between generations, and what each chooses to preserve, transform or leave behind.

Fleck Clerestory Commission Program: Ella Gonzales

October 24, 2026 – March 21, 2027

The Power Plant continues its longstanding Fleck Clerestory Commission Program with Ella Gonzales’s A Room’s Proportion, above or below. The work transforms the gallery with layers of painted, translucent fabric based on the proportions of domestic interiors recalled by the artist from memory. As one remembered space is superimposed onto another, visitors move through overlapping rooms, histories and perspectives.

South Facade Billboard: Morgan Sears-Williams

October 24, 2026 – March 21, 2027

The image in feeling along the edges, consists of several 16mm film strips collated into one frame, capturing Hanlan’s Point Beach, a site of queer community and refuge. Witnessing the gradual geological erosion that is currently occurring there, Sears-Williams filmed the beach, then developed the film in instant coffee and buried it in the sand for five days. The resulting work mirrors the ecological disintegration of Hanlan’s Point with the disappearance of longstanding public spaces for queer communities.

Events

Connectors: International Speaker Series — Zita Cobb
Wednesday, October 21 | 7pm
Harbourfront Studio Theatre
Registration Required

Fall/Winter Exhibitions Opening Reception
Friday, October 23 | 7pm – 9pm
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery
RSVP Required

About The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery

The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery is Canada’s leading public gallery devoted to contemporary art, ideas, and conversations. Located on Toronto’s waterfront, The Power Plant is a vital forum for the creative culture of our time, sharing inspiring and transformative experiences with audiences through free admission to exhibitions and public programs. The Power Plant is guided by the commitment to provide a platform for artists from diverse backgrounds, drawing attention to pressing issues and connecting communities in Canada and worldwide through contemporary art. For more information, please visit thepowerplant.org.

The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery
231 Queens Quay West, Toronto, Ontario M5J 2G8
thepowerplant.org
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