The Breadth of Distance now open at Humber Galleries

Amber Williams-King, preface ii (i have seen many suns…), 2018, appropriated image, indigo-dyed linen, wax-print fabric, beading, and paint.

The Breadth of Distance

Amber Williams-King, Charlene Vickers, Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Melisse Watson, Petrina Ng, Soko Fong Negash, Shellie Zhang
Curated by: Alize Zorlutuna

February 4, 2019 – April 5, 2019
Opening Reception Wednesday, February 6, 5-8 PM at L Space Gallery

we carry continents,
cross oceans,
traverse vast distances while still.

the scent of comfort,
is also longing.
what goes unsaid,
a kind of knowing.

how do elsewheres live in the body?

in dreams?
half-remembered tongues.
in what cannot be named.

Bringing together photography, video, installation, and sculpture, these artworks shift across geographies, cultural perspectives, and time. Considering grief, longing, care and resilience, they articulate how relationships to place, representation, and belief shape who we are and how we move in the present.

This exhibition asks us to reckon with how we came to be here on this land. Whether we are Indigenous, multi-generational settlers, or recent immigrants, our current moment demands we think through how we might build mutual understanding and empathy while recognizing our many differences.

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North Space Gallery
Humber College North Campus
LRC 1st Floor
205 Humber College Blvd.
Toronto, ON M9W 5L7

L Space Gallery
Humber College Lakeshore Campus
Room L1002
19 Colonel Samuel Smith Park Dr.
Toronto, ON M8V 4B6

Hours: Monday to Friday, 10 AM – 4 PM

Humber Galleries are fully accessible and barrier free spaces.

For additional information please contact danica.evering@humber.ca, visit http://www.humbergalleries.ca/, or find @humbergalleries on social media.

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Chun Hua Catherine Dong
Chun Hua Catherine Dong is a Chinese-born Montreal based artist working with performance, photography, and video. She received a BFA from Emily Carr University Art & Design and MFA from Concordia University. She has performed and exhibited her works in multiple international festivals and venues, such as Quebec City Biennial, Kaunas Biennial, The Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne in Paris, DongGang Museum of Photography in South Korea, Bury Art Museum in Manchester, Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn, Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival in Chicago, 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art in Toronto, and so on. She was the recipient of the Franklin Furnace Award for contemporary avant-garde art in New York in 2014, and listed the “10 Artists Who Are Reinventing History” by Canadian Art in 2017, and ‘‘Top Nine Political Art Projects of 2010’’ by Art and Threat magazine.

Soko Fong Negash
soko fong negash is a toronto-born kid of chinese-eritrean descent. she’s a cancerian (read: cries a lot), likes making things with her hands, and currently plays between the worlds of documentary film, photography, audio compositions, and material arts. Soko completed her bachelor’s degree at Ryerson University (2013), where she studied rta school of media. Her work concerns themes of ancestral knowledge, care, and the mundane, and is an attempt at translation–across generations, between cultures, and from person-to-person. she recently completed an artist residency at the Robert Mclaughlin Gallery in Oshawa and is currently finishing a residency at the nia centre.

Petrina Ng
Petrina Ng is a visual artist and cultural worker based in Toronto. Her multi-form feminist practice connects intimacy, grief, and absurdity. Recent exhibition sites include FOFA Gallery (Montréal), Blackwood Gallery (Mississauga), and Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto). Ng also publishes books about art in collaboration with designer Rachel Wallace as the imprint, Durable Good. She holds an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art and is currently Assistant Curator at the Small Arms Inspection Building/Museums of Mississauga.

Charlene Vickers
Charlene Vickers is an Anishnabe artist living and working in Vancouver. Born in Kenora, Ontario and raised in Toronto, she explores her Ojibway ancestry through painting, sculpture, performance, and video examining memory, healing and embodied connections to ancestral lands. Trained as a painter, she graduated from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 1994 and attended Simon Fraser University, BA (1998) and MFA (2013.) Her work has been exhibited across Canada and the United States, and can be found in the permanent collection at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Vickers most recent solo exhibitions include, Speaking With Hands and Territories, SFU Galleries and Coverings at Macaulay and Co in Vancouver and group exhibitions The Map Is Not The Territory at the Portland Art Museum, I continue to shape at The Art Museum at U of T in Toronto and An Assembly of Shapes at Oakville Galleries.

Melisse Watson

Amber Williams-King
Amber Williams-King is a multi-disciplinary Antiguan artist living and practicing in Toronto, Canada. Working in a variety of mediums including photography, collage, printmaking and animation, she sees mixed media as a way of acknowledging the multiplicity and fluidity of being. This self-taught practice seeks to challenge notions of a monolithic Black experience; exploring sexuality, gender, race, representation and the intersections of identity. She uses found texts and images to interrogate socio-political landscapes in an effort to excavate new possibilities and future imaginings. Much of this work starts from a deeply intimate place drawing from Amber’s experiences as a Black queer femme living with chronic illness in a world that says she should not exist; she exists through her artistic envisioning. Amber has exhibited in spaces across Toronto including the Art Gallery of Ontario and has upcoming exhibitions in Montreal and Brazil.

Shellie Zhang
Shellie Zhang (b. 1991, Beijing, China) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. She has exhibited at venues including WORKJAM (Beijing), Scope Art Fair (Switzerland) and Public House of Art (Netherlands). She is a recipient of grants such as the RBC Museum Emerging Professional Grant, the Toronto Arts Council’s Visual Projects grant, and the Canada Council’s Project Grant to Visual Artists. Recent projects include a residency at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Creative Time Summit, and publication with the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU).