Jim Holyoak in a group exhibition at the Biosphere Space for Life Museum
September 5th, 2026 – May 2nd, 2027
Montreal, Quebec
Moth House is on view at the Biosphere Space for Life Museum in Montreal as part of the exhibition A World in Common. Designed in two parts, the first of which was presented at the Grantham Foundation this summer, the exhibition opening at the Biosphere brings together works by Geneviève Chevalier, Jim Holyoak, Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens, Taqralik Partridge & Tiffany Shaw, and Miranda Smitheram. As described by the co-curators Julie Bélisle and Josianne Poirier, “A World in Common brings together artists whose works offer a broad understanding of the concept of hospitality to include the more-than-human living world.”
Moth House is a densely detailed, panoramic, drawing-collage installation, born of the artist’s concern for the crisis of insect decline, and of his interest in the visitors to the nocturnal pollinator garden which grows outside his studio in Nelson, BC. Within Moth House, Holyoak’s intention is to seek empathy with profound alterity, and to make visible the denizens of an unseen world.
The drawing was created in segments, inside and outside of Holyoak’s studio, in a high-ceilinged boat-garage on Salt Spring Island and during The System and Other Universes residency at the Banff Centre (led by Shary Boyle and Howie Tsui). The Biosphere presents the second iteration of the installation, revised to fit its 28’ x 16’ central wall. Holyoak has created new layers of foreground vegetation, and added innumerable drawn details. The thought and word bubbles, which were empty in the first iteration, are now populated with drawings of nonverbal thoughts, creating imagined worlds and nested narratives.
