MTLNYC

Galerie Deux Poissons is delighted to present MTLNYC, a group show focusing on the relationship in visual arts between Montreal and New York City. Concurrent to our Manhattan-based project Shadow Brokers in collaboration with Super Dutchess Gallery, this exhibition presents the visually and conceptually diverse works of six artists whose practices overlap the two cities of Montreal and New York.

Nadine Faraj’s colourful works on paper depict an array of social drama and the investigation of identity across multiple fronts. A riotous environment ensues, sometimes funny, sometimes angry, and sometimes explicitly erotic – and sometimes all of those at once – in which she hybridizes and splices a fascinating demimonde from pop and subcultural photographic sources.

Annie Hémond Hotte’s paintings and drawings use a skillfully practised touch with paint and a zinging colour palette to bring out works that combine the figurative with the abstract in a peculiar and particular manner. She creates inexplicable characters and landscapes that somehow easily settle into our eyes and imaginations, carrying a strongly comic and absurdist gusto.

Corina Kennedy’s “Launderer” works explore the historical links and contrasts in between the blue-collar and the white-collar, in terms of the nature of work in the industrial and post-industrial eras, but also in those terms application to criminality. Investigating these matters from a feminist perspective, on a material level this conceptual project grows out of the once ubiquitous paper collar and cuff garments that were synonymous with “white collar” work, and that had to be sustained by “blue-collar” labour.

Shawn Kuruneru’s shape paintings engage with modern abstraction in a wittily oblique manner, comically subverting as well as directly employing a visually arresting formalist language. These paintings slyly hide swaths of unpainted, potential existent but visually unstated expression, focusing on shutting out the inessential, and arriving at a loose kind of technical perfection.

Amanda Nedham’s work, in both two and three dimensions, virtuosically mines a semiotic library of socially charged imagery. Mixing the historical with the contemporary, the pop cultural with the esoteric, and the general with the personal and private, she deploys compellingly graceful installations that possess a high degree of technical and intellectual skill.

Bea Parsons monotype prints explore a dreamlike natural world of symbols and cryptic but powerful narratives. Engaging with a variety of painting and drawing techniques brought into printmaking, she unfolds a darkly beautiful private drama, that remains nonetheless openly engaging, and suggestively accessible.