Liane Odze-Silver: This Stage

Liane Odze-Silver, Let it Be, 2026, Oil paint and graphite pencil on canvas, 48.75″ x 65″

Liane Odze-Silver: This Stage

September 30 – October 18, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 3, 2:30–5:30pm | artist in attendance
Gerrard Art Space, Toronto

Exhibition Statement

Sombre reflections, which you see here, are action-thoughts, moral equivalencies to what I have carried from the dance floor. People in their distinctiveness making shapes and movements together, going, coming, staying, stopping, trying, forming, struggling, reforming, and repeating again.

The floor is my base for dance. It is an experiment in togetherness. In dance, on the stage, it is commonly successful, but less so off the stage.

Togetherness, as a universal concept, appears to be elusive. It slips away from our grasp, over and over. It can’t be sustained. It is pre-empted, by ideology, by opinion, by feelings, by beliefs, by personality, by words, by leaders. It runs away faster than we can catch it. It flings itself away from a moral base. It can’t be held. It has flashes of hopeful promise and paroxysms of evil undoing. We try to maintain our vitality. As humans we are lucky to be able to do that.

This underlies my work. I am preoccupied by the gravity of dissonance that leads to unresolvable clash. I think about advocating and calling upon the images for support and protection, as in advocare, “to call to one’s aid.” In Latin vocare mean “to call” or “to summon.” I invoke the images to concede to peace and the commission of hope. I want world circumstances to be better. I don’t expect fortuitous outcome as guaranteed.

The spectacle that is humanity learns not from the stage, where there is a container and limits. Not anything goes. We seem to be able to create that vow on the stage, but not in life, but we are the same people that move between these two liminal spaces, one more fleeting than the other. This piques my interest in temporary, in-between spaces. They are transitional and create change.

The vastness in meaning that we assign to transition seems to be an obstacle to togetherness. We each have our own interpretation to get stuck on or hung up on.

If we could sense into each other’s being we might have a chance. I try. My movements are not without weight I think to myself. I am harnessed to the earth by my physicality, literally, and, therefore, also to others. The floor teaches me this obstinately.

In terms of the materiality of this work, you can see that it often exists at the intersection of painting and drawing. This may be a consequence of how I work or it may be an aesthetic that appeals to my sensibility, as an artist, since I am drawn to other work that illuminates that idea.

About the Artist

Liane Odze-Silver is a Canadian artist who works in painting and drawing. A graduate of OCAD, Liane had a solo exhibition at Workscene Gallery in Toronto and then went on to be part of an exhibition called Diverse City, Contemporary Works by 26 Artists which received a Canada Council Explorations Programme Grant and a Toronto Arts Council Grant. Liane was represented from 2010 to 2011 by the Gallery Moos Ltd Contemporary Art Programme and then from 2011 to 2013 by artProfile. A Juror’s Award from the Art Gallery of Peel (Peel Art Gallery Museum and Archives) in the 30th Annual Juried Exhibition followed a solo exhibition at the Campus Gallery, located at Georgian College. Liane has participated in numerous exhibitions and juried exhibitions and exhibits her work regularly in solo exhibitions at Gerrard Art Space, in Toronto, where she is an Artist Member. Liane’s ongoing concern with conceptualizing specificity and transposition to the universal is evident in her exhibitions.

Contact
www.lianeodzesilver.art | lianeodzesilver@gmail.com | @odzesilver