THE WAITING ROOM

Anne Dahl, Colin Canary, Josi Smit, Masha Granich

Curator: Emma Ongman

Opening July 16, from 5 pm to 8 pm

McBride Contemporain is thrilled to present The Waiting Room, a group exhibition featuring Anne Dahl, Colin Canary, Josi Smit and Masha Granich. Curated by Emma Ongman, the exhibition brings together four Montreal-based artists working across painting, drawing, sculpture and photography. Rather than passive suspension, waiting is presented as a shared condition of human experience where meaning accumulates, relationships shift, and personal and collective transformation quietly takes shape.

Anne Dahl builds sculptural assemblages from reclaimed materials that bring fragility, weight, and value into tension, questioning how digital technology culture shapes our relationship to objects and to ourselves. Drawing on traditional methods of timekeeping, her wood and wax sculptures incorporate candles embedded with pieces of metal, evoking historical devices that measured the passage of time through the gradual melting of wax and the falling of metal markers. Held in a state of anticipation, the sculptures suggest the possibility of time itself becoming an active collaborator.

Colin Canary approaches the image as an unstable presence, his photo-paintings remaining in a perpetual state of becoming. Translating photographs into hazy, repetitive forms, his works are constructed through the simultaneous addition and removal of layers of paint, allowing traces of their previous states to remain visible. The images persist beneath the surface without ever fully disappearing, inhabiting a space between recollection and forgetting, where their afterimage emerges through a slow process of sedimentation and erosion.

Josi Smit combines vernacular photography, sculpture, and installation to construct quiet spaces where memory hovers at the threshold of revelation. A printed photograph on textile veils a dried flower enclosed within a handcrafted wooden frame, delaying its discovery. A window blind installation echoes the slow passage of daylight and invites viewers into a nonlinear experience of time, where perception and remembrance become inseparable.

Masha Granich constructs autofictional worlds rooted in memory, folklore, and displacement. Their ballpoint pen drawings on canvas, mounted into antique wooden objects, hold narrative in suspense: an egg yet to hatch, a whispered secret, a closed door concealing peeking children, a calm horse before the threat of a sting. These works interweave superstition and healing, using domestic symbols to form a visual language in which heritage, mythmaking, and prayer are reflected on.

Across their varied practices, these artists approach material as something that gathers meaning through patience and repetition. The Waiting Room explores how belief and memory are shaped during moments of anticipation, where transformation and potential coexist. As a meditation on presence and absence, appearance and disappearance, the exhibition invites us to reflect on what moments of uncertainty reveal, and on the futures that remain possible before they unfold.

More information and exhibition views to come.