‘CrossRoads’: Group SHow

Opening Reception: Thursday, February 27th 2020, 6-9pm
Exhibition Dates: Feb 27 - April 12, 2020 Location: Patel Gallery, 1151 Queen St E

Participating Artists:

Shuvinai Ashoona Greg Ito Mia Sandhu Marigold Santos Alex Sheriff Winnie Truong Nadia Waheed Shaheer Zazai

In her 1987 book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Borderlands/The Border: The New Hybridity), the Mexican American feminist/queer theorist Gloria E. Anzaldúa examines what it is to be of two places at once through the concept of ‘La Frontera’ or ‘The Borderland’.  This space is embedded into the soul and written into DNA - the result of “living on borders and in margins.” It is the duality and the conflict of keeping “intact one’s shifting and multiple identity”. This hybridity is sacred, magical, mythical and sometimes sinister; here ‘en la frontera’ the inhabitants are shape changers and conduits. To survive they live ‘sin fronteras’ (without restraints), existing everywhere and nowhere living amongst the ghosts and spirits. In touch with multiple frequencies, they hold an axis in their hands, leading to places unknown.

This exhibition presents a selection of artists who are the inhabitants of these crossroads. Each artist’s life and practice has been shaped by their own Frontera, and like ancient storytellers they wield the ability to transform both the viewer and the creator through self - created worlds. The impact of this manifests itself across each work, creating a palimpsest of personal histories, mythologies, memories, and dreams. Simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar each work becomes a personal dialogue in a global conversation, a distinctive voice created within an indistinct physical location. In this space, play and exploration is encouraged and a new mythos (one in which the complex ideas of personhood, identity and history are given permission to exist in all their plurality) guides to an insight into the unique, often conflicting, but sacred existence of the in-between.

Curated by: Rebecca Davison-Mora