372 rue Ste-Catherine O, #410, MOntréal
Summoning the Ineffable | February 27 – April 12, 2025
Braxton Garneau, Sukaina Kubba, Marigold Santos, Dominique Sirois, Sergio Suárez, Swapnaa Tamhane.
In Summoning the Ineffable, we are presented with a polyphonic expression of the stories that materials contain. All mediums are perpetually in relation to histories of production, consumption, extraction, and creation. Here, the artists explore the affective dimensions of materials that have been passed through hands and across generations, a reminder that small gestures accumulate into expansive possibility.
Sukaina Kubba’s material and cultural research practices are inextricably enmeshed, like sand in the fibres of a fishing net, or crumbs in the weave of a dining room rug. This symbolic rug, as well as literal Persian ones, are frequently referenced across her practice. Through their patterns, rugs tell stories of travel and trade, and in their entirety they contain histories of production, acquisition, displacement, and display. By studying and repeating the lines and colours woven in each piece, Kubba can absorb the different range of information stemming from these heirlooms. Inextricable links amass into familiar figures, vertical landscapes replete with flora and fauna, or more abstracted homages to the sensation of embodied memory and the immaterial experiences that exist on the edge of articulation. Using 3D filament to recreate rugs and their internal pattern, Kubba’s works flow between drawing and sculpture, open-ended and enclosed, holed and delineated.
Braxton Garneau’s works focus on expressing the essence of materials, effectively creating a conceptual bridge between the substances that construct our visible world and the choices, identities, and play that we use to fashion ourselves individually. Garneau works with a dizzying range of harvested and then hand-processed mediums, including asphalt, raffia, cotton, linen, sugarcane pulp, bones, and shells. In this way, this body of work speaks towards, and is actively produced by, the sticky, ebbing, and ineffable stuffs of the material world. These ‘stuffs’ are then transformed into self-adornment that plays with codes which flow between celebratory and protective, masquerade and armour. The represented figures are both visible and disguised, the result being that the viewer can only partially know, and therefore consume, their image. By utilizing the active potential of transformation and metamorphosis, Garneau’s works generate power to exist as fluid entities.
By virtue of their intrinsic reference to accounts, and encounters of the body, Marigold Santos’ works are experienced as a total somatic registration. With works like Banig 3, she elevates ubiquitous, handwoven mats into spaces for rest and healing for Filipinx people. In the terno armour series, the viewer is presented with traditional shoulder adornments, in which the original piña material is replaced by locally sourced cotton. Santos embroiders them with familiar flora and fauna from the Philippines, a subversive act of meditation and symbolic protection, like scattering seeds. A generative tension is struck as these sleeves allude directly to human busts, while simultaneously omitting one body in particular. And so, instead of functioning as an abyss, the adorned negative space becomes a lacuna for augmentation, adornment, and possibility. And, as in Santos’ tattoo practice, the works obey a logic of addition and subtraction, tradition and adaptation; a fluid identity embodied by displacement and grounding.
Although the point of origin is elsewhere, the notion of trans-continental fluidity also manifests in Dominique Sirois’s busts. These works function as explorations of how motifs are transmitted by the mechanics of artistic production and spiritual practices, through and against industrialized, globalized temporalities. Sirois intentionally commingles various references in her oxidized, coloured clay figures. As such, depending on the viewer’s angle, they can be read as mutations between Kishangarh inspired paintings, the interior of industrialized objects, the intricacies of a Gyan chaupar game, or a cubist, colonial appropriation of primitive art. While these fragmented bodies incarnate the wide range of Sirois’ personal interests and beliefs, the Fire Flowers directly speak to the art of working with clay. By referencing the shape of the cone used to monitor the kiln’s heat, which are then adorned with resilient fire lilies, Sirois once again invites us to consider the figurative and literal space that reified motifs occupy in our collective psyche.
Sergio Suárez’s woodcuts construct scenes that exist at the periphery of visibility — a space in which cosmic interconnectivity fuses with quotidian experiences of the ineffable. Suárez describes his woodblock printing practice as “composing in time”, and it is as if each work contains an internal mythology, to which the viewer is privy to a single moment in an unknown, prolonged chronology. Every scene feels temporally in flux, existing as stamps from an ambiguous epoch, amplified by the weaving of mixed iconographies like Mesoamerican cosmologies, catholic theological painting, contemporary telescopic observations, and western metaphysical philosophy, and Western metaphysical philosophy. These works contain an intricate balance of pressure and lightness, thematically with the omission of sunlight, and physically with the necessary force to make the marks in the wood for printing. Like a blurred mass passing beneath a streetlamp, these works exist in partial occlusion, resulting in certainty being supplanted by imagination.
Swapnaa Tamhane’s probing drawings, combined with extracts from text messages from a former lover, hold the viewer’s gaze directly. These drawings twist away from a documentarian impulse, or easy narrativization, as they appear alongside epistolary text. In the emphasized creases, roundness, and crevices, these sketches exceed the two-dimensionality of the page. In her careful practice of recording figures, vessels, and objects individually, Tamhane allocates space to historically anonymized Indian craftspeople. Their fingerprints in clay, stone, or bronze supersede the more obvious graphite marks of the drawings themselves. Juxtaposed alongside unedited text
messages, these sketches allude to the diaristic experience of making art. Their highly personal content contrasts with the anonymity of the artists who made the represented artifacts. The viewer is left with a sense that craftspeople exceeded their fixed position, or the psychological and historical containers that they’ve been placed in, just as the lover from Tamhane’s past arrived unexpectedly in the present tense.
If human positionalities are the product of social and historical determinism, so are our human forms the consolidation of sweeping and varied material: data, anecdotes, plastics, grit, dust, beads, rain. Materials tell tellurian stories of attention to earthly cycles, the advent of polymers, cosmological origin, and the human phenomenological experience of navigating these elements.
- Emily Zuberec and Roxanne Arsenault
Braxton Garneau is a visual artist based in amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton, Canada). He holds a BFA from the University of Alberta and has had solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton (2024), Efraín López, New York (2024), GAVLAK, Los Angeles (2023) and Stride Gallery, Calgary (2021). His work was featured in the retrospective exhibition Black Every Day at the Art Gallery of Alberta (2021), It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900 - 1970 and Now at Mitchell Art Gallery, Edmonton (2020), and New Direction at Château Cîroc, Miami, Florida (2021). In 2024, his work was Pitch Lake (Pietà) acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego through the Northern Trust Purchase Prize at EXPO Chicago, and he was awarded the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award. From March-June 2025, he will be in residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), Brooklyn, NY.
Sukaina Kubba is an Iraqi-born Toronto-based multi-disciplinary artist whose work is rooted in material and cultural research, material experimentation, storytelling and drawing connections. Kubba’s work has been included in Toronto at Patel Brown (2024), Greater Toronto Art Triennial at MOCA (2024), Mercer Union SPACE Billboard Commission (2023-24), the plumb (2023), The Next Contemporary (2023), Art Gallery of Ontario (2019), Aga Khan Museum (2017); and in Scotland at Dundee Contemporary Arts (2024), Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow (2016), Glasgow International (2016 and 2014) and Kendall Koppe, Glasgow (2013). She has upcoming exhibitions at Western Exhibitions, Chicago (Apr 2025) and Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa (Jan 2026). Kubba has recently completed residencies at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York and La Wayaka Current, Chile. She is a sessional lecturer in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, and was previously a curator and lecturer at The Glasgow School of Art (2013–2018).
Marigold Santos was born in the Philippines, and immigrated with her family to Canada in 1988. She pursues an inter-disciplinary art practice that examines diasporic lived experience and storytelling, presented within the otherworldly. She holds a BFA from the University of Calgary, and an MFA from Concordia University. As a recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, she continues to exhibit widely across Canada. Her recent solo exhibitions include SURFACE TETHER at the Art Gallery of Alberta (2019) MALAGINTO at Montréal, Arts Interculturels (MAI) and the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina (2019), the pace and rhythm of time, floating at The Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG) and Patel Brown, Toronto (2023). In 2023, she was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award. Santos maintains an active studio practice and resides in Treaty 7 Territory, in Mohkinstsis/Calgary.
Originally from Tiohtiàke/Mooniyang/Montréal, artist and educator Dominique Sirois holds a master’s degree (2010) and a doctorate (2022) in visual arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Sirois’ work has been shown in several artist-run centers across Canada, including Latitude 53 (Edmonton), CLARK and Diagonale (Montréal), AXENÉO7 (Gatineau) and L’Œil de Poisson (Québec City). She has also exhibited in several private galleries in Montréal: Bradley-Ertaskiran, Blouin-Division, Pangée and Patel Brown, with whom she collaborates. She has completed numerous residencies outside Québec, including in Glasgow (Scotland), Paris (France), Barcelona (Spain) and Banff (Canada). Sirois has presented her work in group and collaborative exhibitions at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest (Hungary), the Commun in Geneva (Switzerland), the PHI Foundation and the Galerie de l’UQAM in Montréal. Her work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts (CCA), the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CAC) and the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FRQSC).
Sergio Suárez is a Mexican-born, Atlanta-based visual artist and printmaker. Currently on view exhibitions are Situar la Orilla del Cosmos at Casa Wabi Sabino in CDMX. Recent solo exhibitions took place at Pale Fire Projects, British Comlumbia; KDR, Miami Florida; Stove Works, Tennesse; THE END Project Space Atlanta & Whitespace Gallery, Georgia. His work has been included in the Haugesund International Relief Festival in Norway and the Woolwich Print Fair in London. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023 and has held residencies at The Bemis Center in Nebraska; The Penland School of Craft, North Carolina; Stove Works, Tennesse & The Hambidge Center, Georgia. He is a 2024-2025 MoCA GA Working Artist Project Fellow with a 2025 forthcoming solo exhibition in June at MoCA GA, Atlanta. He is the director of Eso Tilin Projects, and was part of the Studio Artist Program at Atlanta Contemporary from 2021-2023. He lives and works in Atlanta.
Swapnaa Tamhane’s art practice is dedicated to drawing, making handmade paper, and working with the material histories of cotton and jute, while her curatorial interests explore feminist histories in India. She has an MFA in Fibres & Material Practices, Concordia University, Montreal. Residencies have been held at Bemis Centre for Contemporary Art, 2024, and Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria, and she was a participant at March Meeting, Sharjah, UAE, in 2010. In 2019, she was a juror for the Sobey Art Award, Canada, and was most recently on the board of SAVAC, Toronto. Her research extends to material culture, and with designer Rashmi Varma, she wrote SĀR: The Essence of Indian Design, Phaidon Press (2016). She has exhibited her work at Green Art Gallery, Dubai; Nature Morte, Delhi; articule, Montreal; Sculpture Park Jaipur; A Space, Toronto; and Victoria & Albert Museum, Dundee, Scotland, with solo exhibitions at Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, and Surrey Art Gallery, British Columbia.
