Vick Naresh & Ravinder Ruprai: Gatekeepers

Vick Naresh & Ravinder Ruprai
Gatekeepers

June 2 – 27, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 6, 2 – 5pm
Finissage: Saturday, June 27
The Assembly Gallery, Hamilton

Gatekeepers brings together new paintings of Vick Naresh and the textile and fibre works of Ravinder Ruprai, two distinct yet deeply resonant practices united by a shared inheritance and a shared reckoning.

Both artists carry within their work the experience of displacement, of crossing thresholds, geographic, cultural, and personal, that reshape how one sees, remembers, and belongs. As South Asian artists who have made Canada home, Naresh and Ruprai do not simply depict that experience; they transform it into form, surface, and colour. Gatekeepers takes its title not from those who restrict passage and control access, but from the act of transcending them, the quiet, persistent work of reclaiming memory, identity, and selfhood on one’s own terms.

Naresh’s paintings hold organic complexity and geometric order in tension, layered with qualifying imagery but open to something larger, almost immaterial. Ruprai works across paint, fabric, hand stitching, and gilded framing, stitching together the intimate and the structural, the personal wound and the wider world that shaped it.

Together, their work invites us to consider how identity is held, inherited, and reshaped. In this shared space, painting and textile become two ways of telling the same essential story: that to make art from a diasporic experience is itself an act of passage, a crossing, and a claiming.

Instagram @vicknaresh | @ravinder_ruprai

Vick Naresh’s presentation is made possible through generous funding from the City of Hamilton via the City Enrichment Fund.

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