Demonstration
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Suite 204 - 222 East Georgia Street, rear entrance
Vancouver, BC, V6A 4J
Alix Van Der Donckt-Ferrand
Magda Ewelina
Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill
Juan Pablo Hernandez Gutierrez
Garrett Lockhart
Shahin Sharafaldin
Katayoon Yousefbigloo
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Central to the thematic concerns of this exhibition is the spirit of material experimentation and intervention. Demonstration brings together works by artists who oscillate between abstract and representational styles, while employing objects and nontraditional materials on their surfaces. A fragmentation of identity, of community, togetherness while also relating to the kind of multiplicity of material interplay presented here.
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These artists are working within the mediums of collage and assemblage; layering scraps of everyday images and objects, they create the potential for the works to resonate broadly. Here, amidst the amalgamation of material, substrate is lost, muddied, or obfuscated to create a sense of wear with implications of use and use value. An aesthetic of erosion, or patina, carries both the enigma of what has transpired and veneration for what has sustained, collapsing the distance between both individual and collective resonances.
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These works by Alix Van Der Donckt-Ferrand executed in graphite and coloured-pencil marks a formal shift in the artist's work in her move towards sparser compositions and the incorporation of found objects. Here, a simultaneous dream-like and diaristic logic materialize. In these works, Donckt-Ferrand’s mobilization of loose and sketch-like marks embodying a seemingly instinctual quality have been swapped for more clearly defined and delineated forms. In one work, You’re richer than you think (2024) a pair of eyes look out to the viewer from the surface of the drawing's paper support, the green and the money motif further extended by the presence of the corner of a found, torn, Canadian twenty dollar bill. Elsewhere, a composition titled L’Invisible (2025) revolves around a 5G tower and a windmill, drawing a connection to the money work via a repetition of the eye motif. Here, text makes an appearance. The word “l’invisible” or “the invisible” in English draws a line towards the other words “5G” and “spirit” suggesting a mediation on the forces that govern the world beneath the ocular. To the left, what appears at first as a black form turns into a void or gap, when dialogued with a piece of paper adhered to the work in the same shape. Donckt-Ferrand’s visual language appears at once simultaneously highly personal and universal — and it is precisely her works’ ability to take up seemingly oppositional poles in the space of the frame that lends her compositions its sense of vitality. These tensions— inner and outer worlds, the spiritual and the technological, the material and the psychic, occupy an unsteady territory in which the composition speaks to a deeply personal articulation of the artist’s experience of the world. But rather than retreating into a pure interiority, the web of referents drawn out here inevitably, and productively, insinuate a chain of relationships that for the viewer, on the one hand, feels immediately recognizable, and on the other, seductively opaque.
People (2025) is an ongoing work by Polish-Can collective Magda Ewelina consisting of a series of sculptural, assemblaged-based objects utilizing a range of found materials collected from sites such as the La Biennale di Venezia and other such contexts. This new body of work by M.E. investigates the display of personas that was first shown in an intimate gallery space (artist studio) known as the People on Fraser Street in Vancouver, where a large group of local artists collaborate to create a DIY context for exhibiting art. Items such as tote bags become bloated, layered with added materials, and bedazzled with a myriad of objects related to the body or other such accessories.
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Planting (2025) and Swimming (2025) by Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill are two compositions of Crisco soaked paper topped with oil paint, forming an abstract background upon which sits a loose collage of mixed-media comprising of seeds and cut-out images. The thick, viscous quality of the paint here lends the work an indexical quality in the way in which it clearly preserves the artist’s gestures with the brush.
These works are marked by a dream-like logic in which loosely associated forms — bonded through formal or categorical affinities — bubble up from the support of the painting’s surface. These work build upon Hill’s Spells series which also mobilize the use of infused-Crisco paint. In these works, the artist adhered found material to the work’s surface such as beer can tabs, flowers, and dollar store charms. What this results in is a kind of cartographic gesture, in which the artist’s navigation of space becomes condensed into the picture plane, proffering up alternate modes of conceptualizing a land-body relationship.
Juan Pablo Hernandez Guttierz’s diptych informal ways to hopefully make a quick money (2024) arrives at a painterly end via a route formed by assemblage and re-appropriation. Here, two large paintings sit side-by-side; on the left, portrait of a vivisected kidney executed in thick sections of oil paint, and on the right, a yellow-on-yellow and near-monochrome scene of a doe-eyed cartoon character imbibing cocaine. These compositions sit atop a textured patchwork surface, revealing the work’s structural support to not be canvas, but rather a plane of stitched together counterfeit soccer jerseys. The use of forged garments as a material is further pushed beyond the frame of the “canvas” via a fake Gucci purse perched on the upper left hand corner.
What becomes mapped out within the space of informal ways to hopefully make a quick money is a dizzying triangulation between varying forms of desire, value, and the necessary means to attain them, a series of relations equally as complex as this work’s status as assemblage, painting, and sculpture. The use of counterfeits (particularly in the age of exacting dupes) gestures towards the fleeting desire ascribed to commodities, and a tongue in cheek gesture into its inclusion into an artwork, itself an object category that inhabits unsteady ground within capitalist exchange. A bodily dimension is evinced in this work via the kidney, a gesture towards the black market organ trade, further expanding the above relationships. If organ trading and counterfeits form two types of illegal commodities, as well as modes of access for the working poor, their articulation in the painting cheekily points towards the art object as something that operates in a similar way; not only a means of acquiring rapid wealth, but skirting legal limits through operations such as art collecting as a non-taxeable means of hoarding wealth, or art (painting in particular) as an excellent vehicle of value for those needing to move money across borders outside of the regulations of the bank or law.
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Oftentime’s, Garrett Lockhart’s work functions as a kind of home building which comes into being through the artist’s use of a dizzying array of forms, materials, and reference matter. This mode of practice, partially stagecraft, and certainly an exteriorization of the artist’s interior world becomes concentrated here in Water Lily (after Thomas Struth) (2025). Consisting of a small t-shirt filled with down, embalmed in primer, and printed with a water lily which references a work by the artist summoned by the title. This pillow-like sculpture suggests a missing Lilliputian wearer, simultaneously bearing a comforting, domestic quality, and a haunting kind of absence. This work continues the artist’s leitmotif of working with clothing and textiles, an abstracted articulation of their engagement with and interest in the often (unfairly) cloistered world of fashion. In this dual quality of both garment and art object under the sign of the water lily, the myth of the Lotophagi comes to mind. Translated from Greek, the term means “lotus-eater”, a mythical race that appears in Homer's odyssey, who feed on the sweet flower and live in a state of apathetic bliss. When Homer’s men land on the island, their consumption of the flower leads them to abandon their desire to return home, but rather stay amongst the lotus-eaters, consuming the intoxicating bloom.
Shahin Sharafaldin’s Untitled (2025) is a pencil crayon on paper portrait that signals a material shift in the artist’s practice. Typically working with oil paint, Sharafaldin’s work touches upon the bonds between queerness, fantasy, and the engagement of the human figure as an inexhaustible and complex signifier. Historically, Sharafaldin’s work has occupied multiple poles. Vivid pigmentation renders service to compositions that vary from richly detailed portraits to “naturalistic” scenes that verge on pure abstraction. In some works, the artist renders images of seemingly concrete reality, and in others, borderline psychedelic images of impossible landscapes, flayed bodies, and abandoned landscapes. Although references images and material fold themselves into the artist’s practice, the degree into which they dictate the final work is hazy.
In this instance, the artist has rendered a pencil crayon portrait of a figure in a muted neutral palette of grey, white, and black. The subject of the portrait is a fabrication on the part of the artist but bears a pronounced uncanniness, a quality of someone we have already encountered. When considering Sharafaldin’s mobilization of painting as means of negotiating or understanding one's identity and relationship to the world, we can view Untitled as emblematic of the artist's oeuvre, insofar it articulates via the painted (or rendered) images the ways in which the medium operates as the juncture it which a view of the world becomes formed —held between the poles of mind and material.
Through the use of a wide array of materials and media, Katayoon Yousefbigloo’s oeuvre engages the way in which mythology and media interact. This process takes place not only via the plastic arts but a multifaceted, communally engaged mode of making, which arrives through Yousefbigloo’s participating in bands such as Puzzlehead, Liquidation World (a submissions-based store), and P.L.U.R.O.M.A, an itinerant runway show. In performances, live improvisation summons a site-response engagement to the event. In this exhibition, we are presented with two wall works and a video. In the latter instance, titled Ziggy and Iris (2025), a formally chopped-and-screwed video of two dogs playing is repeatedly slowed down and paused whilst an ambient track plays. Part video and part sculpture, the work is brought out of the realm of the virtual via a dog leash and a scratch ticket with the word “HOUND”, injecting an element of chance into a work, troubling the idea of the object as pure, artificial intentionality by the artist’s hand. In Elastic Cop (2025) a hourglass metal armature is bound by rubber bands which secure two washed out images of a leering police officer. In another wall work, a similarly sleek, metal framing element functions as a two-sided picture frame, one with a monochromatic pink images of two dogs playing, and the other, a color-corrected image of a crowd or rave — the whites exaggerated, the figures almost become obliviated, and become silhouettes or gaps. These works continue Yousefbigloo’s practice of intervening into media in order to ask questions regarding the potentialities (both lost and extant) in the already established — a cop, a dog, a crowd no longer become almost enclosed signs but rather ones that are porous or osmotic.
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List of works, clockwise:
Alix Van Der Donckt-Ferrand
You're richer than you think, 2024
colour pencil & graphite on matboard, 21.5 x 26.7cm
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Shahin Sharafaldin
Untitled, 2025, pencil crayon on paper, 76.2 x 60.9cm
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Katayoon Yousefbigloo
Ziggy and Iris, 2025, 6m7s mini DV video with sound, leash & lottery ticket, dimensions variable
Katayoon Yousefbigloo
Elastic Cop, 2025
6 x 4.5" laser transfer on rubber bands, laser print & plastic frame, 22 x 10.1cm
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Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill
Planting, 2025, Crisco, oil pigments, paper cutouts & Oregon grape seeds, 36 x 30cm
Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill
Swimming, 2025, Crisco, oil pigments & paper cutouts, 36 x 30cm
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Juan Pablo Hernandez Gutierrez
informal ways to hopefully make a quick money, 2024, oil on found and stitched polyester, dimensions variable
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Garrett Lockhart
Water Lily (after Thomas Struth), 2025
laserprint and primer on found t-shirt, thread, feather down & safety pin, 35.5 x 29 x 7.5cm​
Alix Van Der Donckt-Ferrand
L’invisible, 2025
colour pencil & graphite on archival paper, 49.5 x 64.7cm
Alix Van Der Donckt-Ferrand
You're richer than you think, 2025
colour pencil, twenty dollar bill & scotch tape on archival paper, 30.4 x 40.6cm
Magda Ewelina
People, 2025
found objects & ephemera, dimensions variable
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