For this edition of Art Toronto, Galerie Hugues Charbonneau is pleased to present a selection of works by Toko Hara, Moridja Kitenge Banza, Manuel Mathieu, Karen Tam. In addition to the works in our booth, Karen Tam and Manuel Mathieu have been invited to create installations and Shuvinai Ashoona will be highlighted in the Focus section curated by Zoé Whitley.
TOKO HARA
Toko Hara is a Japanese-Canadian emerging artist raised in Toronto and currently based in Montreal. She earned a Bachelor of Design from OCAD University and was the recipient of the 2022 Program Medal. In her practice, she weaves techniques such as bronze-casting, printmaking, and drawing together to create a personal material language that unfolds within space.
MORIDJA KITENGE BANZA
Weaving counter-colonial narratives that emphasize the possibility of regeneration, Moridja Kitenge Banza crafts powerful visions in which hybridity and resiliency engender new subjectivities. His artistic approach straddles fiction and reality to investigate history, memory, and identity across the territories he inhabits and traverses.
MANUEL MATHIEU
Manuel Mathieu is a multi-disciplinary artist, working with painting, ceramics, olfactory art, film and installation. Mathieu’s interests are partially informed from his upbringing in Haiti – just after the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship and his experience emigrating to Canada at the age of 19. His art investigates themes of historical violence, erasure, resilience and cultural approaches to physicality, nature and spiritual legacy.
KAREN TAM
Through her sculptures, cutouts and installation work where she recreates spaces such as the Chinese restaurant, Chinatown curio shops and other sites of cultural encounters, Karen Tam looks at how the corporeal experience of space allows one to understand its history and community. A deep engagement with archival and collections research has led her to question whose histories get to be collected and told, and to interrogate the narratives that have been constructed around the Chinese diaspora.
FOCUS SECTION: SHUVINAI ASHOONA
A 3rd generation artist based in Kinngait, Nunavut, Shuvinai Ashoona (b. 1961) has gained international recognition for her fantastical renderings of the natural world and striking depictions of contemporary Inuit life. Combining references to Indigenous cosmologies and her youth on the territory now known as Dorset Island, Ashoona fuses scenes of daily life with futurist visions of species interdependence.
