Art Toronto 2025

BOOTH C26

Ghislain Brown-Kossi
Cheyenne Rain LeGrande ᑭᒥᐊᐧᐣ
Dion Smith-Dokkie
Joan Balzar

RBC Discover Section

October 23-26
Metro Toronto Convention Centre North Building, Toronto, ON

 For inquiries, contact wil@waapart.com

Working across fields of painting, textiles, sculpture, and performance, the practices of emerging artists Ghislain Brown-Kossi, Cheyenne Rain LeGrande ᑭᒥᐊᐧᐣ, and Dion Smith-Dokkie merge visual languages that both encounter, and disrupt traditional hierarchies of material usage. What occurs between these artists in our presentation is a dialogue that challenges colonial visual codes, and opens up the potential for signifiers to be reassessed and repurposed for cultural reclamation. The works of influential Canadian modernist painter, Joan Balzar, is also paired with these emerging practices, highlighting Balzar’s foundational hard-edge abstraction of visual form which shaped artistic West Coast perspectives.

The paintings of Ghislain Brown-Kossi weave together an understanding of pattern and communication through symbols in relief, painting references to ancestral African patterns which are iterated, commodified, and integrated into contemporary society. With a background in fashion, Brown-Kossi uses bold colours and repetition to define the materiality of textile as language. Investigating cultural opacity through textural legibility, he creates abstractions that toe the line between symbolic recognition and geometric design.

Similarly, Cheyenne Rain LeGrandeᑭᒥᐊᐧᐣ takes the repeated, commodified form of Pepsi can tabs (culturally referred to as Bepsi) to construct a shawl that is as once everyday object, sculpture, and cultural performance ephemera. By weaving together hundreds of these mass produced quotidian objects—signifiers of capitalist consumption—Rain LeGrande transforms the mundane into the culturally significant, and activates its stored potential through performances as her alter ego, Nehiyaw Alien. This shawl melds tradition and contemporary pop culture into new visual codes, suggesting an elevated status of easily overlooked objects.

Dion Smith-Dokkie’s body of paintings takes the window as a point of departure—at once a structure for seeing and an old trope in painting—the works invoke painting as a technology of location. They document summertime meanderings, queer moments reflected in a pane of glass, rain on the skin and rivulets of cloud and light, cascading out from waves. Creating mixed-media works, the variety of techniques demonstrate an ongoing inquiry into the juncture of the sensual, formal, environmental, and deconstructed signifiers. Multiple works incorporate sand and other materials, in the quest for a vibrant surface which further emphasizes Smith-Dokkie’s bodily interventions into visual abstraction. The work makes us question landscape painting as a visual language through a queer Indigenous perspective.

As a female artist working at a time when her practice was under appreciated, Joan Balzar has posthumously gained recognition as one of Canada’s leading modernist painters. Her signature optical art set the stage for younger generations of artists and thinkers to continue breaking down conventions of how we see and interpret art, and Balzar’s paintings contextualize the contemporary abstractions throughout our presentation.

Tying all of these artists’ practices together is an dissection of material language. They each assert new understandings of painting, sculpture, textiles and performance as media, and tease out their inevitable entanglements which influence the ways we interpret visual codes and culture in our day to day lives.

Image:
Ghislain Brown-Kossi, Zaouli 02, 2024
Acrylic, vinyl emulsion, wax fabric, plaster and collage on wood panel
40 x 60 in (101.6 x 152.4 cm)