Curated by Carolin Köchling and Justine Kohleal

For more than two decades, Ellen Gallagher has navigated the fluid geographies of realms both imagined and terrifically real. This exhibition, her Canadian debut, encompasses drawings (from earlier works featuring midcentury glamour shots peddling pomade to new creations populated with coral spawn and seagrass) and paintings, including selections from her recent “Sea Bed” canvases, conjuring the Middle Passage and the wide, watery grave across which slave ships ferried human cargo. Films will also be on view, chief among them her and Edgar Cleijne’s Highway Gothic, 2017, another meditation on transit and dispossession, centering on the natural and cultural damage wrought by the construction of Interstate 10 through New Orleans and Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Swamp. Gallagher’s appropriation of science fiction, advertisements from black photo journals, and the history of whaling, among other sources, here acknowledges unsavory fates while imagining, if not portending, other possible worlds. 

— Suzanne Hudson