Kathleen Hearn,
Ève K. Tremblay, Laura Letinsky,
Micah Lexier & Dave Dyment,
Micah Lexier & Roula Partheniou,
Rhonda Weppler & Trevor Mahovsky,
Luke Painter, Chris Kline, Roula Partheniou
The Closer Together Things Are

Kathleen Hearn is a Toronto-based artist who practices video, installation, photography and performance. Hearn often works with teens in an attempt to understand the relationship between teenage experience, cultural specificity and universal themes of entering adulthood. Recent projects have involved collaborating with teens to re-enact their own experiences with stories unfolding in the popular telenovela media format. Hearn’s work has been shown across Canada and in Argentina, Cuba, Iceland, Senegal, Benin and Nigeria. She received a BA from the University of Guelph and an MFA from Concordia University, Montreal. She is also a professor in Digital Media in the CCIT collaborative program at Sheridan and the University of Toronto Mississauga.

Ève K. Tremblay grew up between Val-David and Montreal. After studies in French Literature at the University of Montreal, she attended The Neighborhood Playhouse School of The Theater in New York. She completed a BFA with a photography major at Concordia University in Montreal in 2000. During the past ten years she has lived and worked between Montreal, Berlin, the New York metropolitan area and has attended many artist residencies such as the iaab (Basel), CEAAC (Strasbourg) and Residency Unlimited (New York). The theme of consciousness is explored in her works with a poetic twist, inspired by literature, theatre, cinema and science. Her recent practice is process-based and includes photography, video, performance, books, mixed media, and image transfers on ceramics. Her works have been published and exhibited widely, namely at the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec, MAC/VAL in France, Bergen Kunsthall in Norway, Kunstraum Kreuzberg in Germany, in the Quebec Triennial at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montreal, the Prague Biennale and Momentum 7, the Nordic Biennale. Tremblay currently lives and works between Montreal and Union City, New Jersey.

Laura Letinsky is a Canadian photographer from Winnipeg currently living and working in Chicago. Her work alludes to human presence most poignantly in its absence: her early, figural work explores ideas of intimacy in relationships, focusing on body language to create implied narratives; her still lifes allude to the human through photographs that describe the aftermath of meals and gatherings. Her most recent work pushes still life toward the edges of abstraction, working with compilations of fragments. Letinsky has shown her work internationally, with recent exhibitions at the Focus Photography Festival Mumbai in India; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Photographers Gallery, London; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others. She holds a BFA from the University of Manitoba, and an MFA from Yale University. She is currently a professor of visual arts at the University of Chicago. Letinsky is represented by Document in Chicago and Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York.

Micah Lexier was born in Winnipeg and lives and works in Toronto. He is a multimedia artist whose many-tiered practice includes sculpture, installation, photography and text-based work, as well as curation. Lexier graduated with an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1984. His practice is consonant with the sensibility of that institution, revolving largely around conceptual acts of enumeration and demarcation. Lexier has had more than 100 solo exhibitions, participated in some 200 group exhibitions and produced numerous permanent public commissions. Recent publications include Call Ampersand Response, a collaborative bookwork made with Michael Dumontier, which was co-published by Artexte and Nieves in 2012, and I’m Thinking of A Number, a 30-year survey of Lexier’s ephemera, published by the Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2010. Lexier is represented by Birch Contemporary, Toronto.

Dave Dyment is a Toronto-based artist whose practice includes audio, video, photography, performance, writing and curating, and the production of artists’ books and multiples. His work mines pop culture for shared associations and alternate meanings, investigating the language and grammar of music, cinema, television and literature, in order to arrive at a kind a folk taxonomy of a shared popular vocabulary. Dyment’s work has exhibited across the country, as well as in New York City, Philadelphia, London, and Dublin, and sits in many private and corporate collections, and in the libraries of the Art Gallery of Ontario and National Gallery of Canada. He is represented by MKG127, Toronto.

Roula Partheniou’s current practice explores the replica and how the remaking of a familiar object can shift our perception and perspective. Her projects tend to take the form of sculptural installations that make use of hyper-real trompe l’oeil, material puns and colour cues to deconstruct the familiar and trigger a reconsideration of common forms. She received her BFA from the University of Guelph in 2001 and currently lives and works in Toronto. She has exhibited throughout Canada and internationally, with recent exhibitions at UWAG in Waterloo, Oakville Galleries, Contemporary Calgary, The Dunlop in Regina, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York, Arróniz Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, and Wu Gallery in Lima. Her work is held in numerous private collections, and in the corporate and institutional collections of the Bank of Montreal, TD Bank, MunichRe, the Royal Bank of Canada, Hyundai Corporation, Blackwood Gallery at University of Toronto Mississauga, Art Museum at University of Toronto, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives. She is represented by MKG127, Toronto.

Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky have worked together since 2004. They both hold MFA degrees from the University of British Columbia. They have exhibited widely, including at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Vancouver Art Gallery; the Power Plant, Toronto; the Textile Museum, Toronto; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax; Tokyo Wonder Site; loopraum, Berlin; LABoral, Gijon; and Dos de Mayo, Madrid. They have completed residencies at apexart, New York (Mahovsky); ISCP, New York (Weppler); and Artspace, Sydney. The work of Weppler/Mahovsky is in numerous collections, including the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the National Gallery of Canada. Weppler currently resides in New York and Mahovsky lives and works in Toronto. They are represented by Susan Hobbs, Toronto.

Luke Painter is an artist working in Toronto. His highly detailed work in ink on paper reveals a laborious process of drawing that results in a collision of elements from different historical periods. Recent exhibitions and screenings of his work include: Modern Wand at Cambridge Galleries (solo 2017), The Teasers and the Tormentors at Galerie Clark in Montreal (solo 2016), Ways of Something at the Whitney Museum of American Art (group 2016), and Five Years of Contemporary Canadian Drawing at the Sudbury Art Gallery (group 2016). Painter has received grants from Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council and has been reviewed by Canadian Art, Border Crossings, and The Globe and Mail and was included in Carte Blanche Vol 2 – Painting, a national survey of Canadian painters. Painter is an Associate Professor at OCAD University in Toronto.

Chris Kline was born in Oshawa, Ontario and attended Queen’s University (BA, Honors) and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He has exhibited at Oakville Galleries, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge, Galerie de l’UQAM in Montreal, L’Arsenal in Montreal, Galerie HBKsaar in Saarbrücken, Germany, and his work was also featured in the 2011 Quebec Triennial. Kline has been a semi-finalist in the RBC Painting Prize, and long-listed for the Sobey Art Award. His work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and the Musée d’art de Joliette in Quebec, as well as various private and corporate collections. He currently lives and works in Montreal.