2025 marks 50 years of the Art Gallery of Burlington (AGB), giving us a unique chance to examine the past, look towards the future and find our place in the present. Exhibitions feature Canadian artists and curators, circulating stories of place and our relationship to time.
The AGB is kicking off this golden anniversary with a winter exhibition opening reception on January 16, 2025 for Time Isn’t Real and Dry Thunder. Members, media, and VIP are invited for a special preview from 5:30–6:30pm, followed by the public opening from 6:30–8:00 pm. Artist remarks and tours will take place at the gallery over the course of the night.
The AGB is thrilled to launch Time Isn’t Real. This landmark exhibition celebrates 50 years of artistic production, cultural festivities, and storytelling through the lens of contemporary Canadian ceramics. It invites viewers to consider how the lessons of the past and the potential of the future shape the artistic moment we live in today.
Opening January 17, 2025, and running until April 27, 2025, this dynamic exhibition, curated by Suzanne Carte, explores the intersections of time, materiality, and imagination. The Lee-Chin Family Gallery, with its vast 4,800 square feet of exhibition space, is dedicated to large-scale initiatives.
Time Isn’t Real invites visitors to reflect on the fluidity of time and its relationship to one of the oldest and most enduring art forms—ceramics. The exhibition takes its title from the words of Ojibwe Anishinaabe Grandmother, Kim Wheatly, who reminds us that indoctrinated time is not the only measure of time, and that the natural cycles of earth and cosmos inform our ways of being. In contrast to this prescribed notion of time, the exhibition invites viewers to reconsider how clay—an ancient material that embodies the passage of time itself—can serve as both a witness and a participant in the shaping of history and the imagining of the future.
The exhibition features works from the AGB’s unparalleled collection of over 4,000 contemporary Canadian ceramic pieces alongside bold new creations by artists including Alex Jacobs-Blum, Roy Caussy x Glenn Lewis, Gabi Dao, Hannah Faas, Thomas Haskell, Manuel Mathieu, Julie Moon, Lindsay Montgomery, Anahita Norouzi, ORXSTRA, Linda Sormin, and Shanie Tomassini. These artists’ explorations span digital innovation sustainable practices, and interdisciplinary approaches, creating a dialogue that transcends temporal and cultural boundaries. The AGB’s smaller exhibition space, the Perry Gallery, is a dedicated 400 square foot area that focuses on project-based applications.
Curated by Sarah Edo, the Perry Gallery features another exhibition, Dry Thunder, opening January 11 and running until April 27, 2025. Dry Thunder, Misbah Ahmed’s first institutional solo exhibition, brings together ceramic sculptures and paintings to explore and meditate on regional folklore, eco-poetics, and urban and wildlife transformation. Similar to the atmospheric and metaphoric contradictions of dry thunder, Ahmed molds traditional vessel shapes into anamorphic forms, inscribing them with local (Sindhi-Punjabi-Hunza) folktales and mythologies.
To learn more about the Art Gallery of Burlington, follow the gallery on social media or check out their website agb.life.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITIONS
Public Opening Reception and Artist Talk: Thursday, January 16, 2025, 6:30 – 8:00 pm
Time Isn’t Real Dates: January 17, 2025 – April 27, 2025
Dry Thunder Dates: January 11, 2025 – April 27, 202
Visit the Art Gallery of Burlington at 1333 Lakeshore Rd. Burlington, ON L7S 1A9 Admission: Free
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Thursday: 10 am – 9 pm, Friday – Sunday: 10 am – 5 pm AGB Shop Hours: Tuesday – Sunday 10 am – 5 pm
Sign-up for our newsletter at agb.life
ABOUT THE AGB
The Art Gallery of Burlington (AGB) is a dynamic space where art, community, and culture converge and share in the wealth of human creativity. We pride ourselves on delivering thought-provoking exhibitions, learning opportunities, and public programs that spark meaningful connections for people to learn, see, think, and make.
Our gallery is home to the largest collection of contemporary Canadian ceramics globally. We offer a unique perspective that challenges traditional boundaries and encourages new ways of thinking and creating.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The Art Gallery of Burlington is supported by the City of Burlington, Ontario Arts Council,
and Ontario Trillium Foundation. The AGB’s learning programming has been sponsored by The Burlington Foundation and the incite Foundation for the Arts. The opening reception for our Winter Exhibitions was made possible with the generous support of Louise Cooke and the 50th Anniversary Exhibitions have been sponsored by the J.P. Bickell Foundation.
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Time Isn’t Real – Artists and Curator Bios
Alex Jacobs-Blum Bio:
Alex Jacobs-Blum is a Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ (Cayuga) and German visual artist and curator living in Hamilton, ON. Her research focuses on Indigenous futurities and accessing embodied Ancestral Hodinöhsö:ni’ knowledge. The core of her practice and methodology is a strong foundation in community building, fostering relationships, empowering youth, and Indigenizing institutional spaces. Her creative process is rooted in storytelling and challenging hierarchical power structures. Alex endeavours to facilitate transformative change infused with love and care, guided by anti-oppressive/anti-racist modalities.
Alex received a Bachelor of Photography at Sheridan College in 2015, where she was awarded the Canon Award of Excellence for Narrative Photography. Her artistic work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the University of Ottawa, the Woodland Cultural Centre and the Robert McLaughlin Gallery. Alex is a member of the Bawaadan Collective.
Artwork Description:
Jacobs-Blum is interested in clay as a world-building material. Introduced in the Haudenosaunee creation story as the original gift to this land, clay has shift-shaping properties and offers unlimited possibilities. In this series, Jacobs-Blum connects with clay through a performance documented in the three photographs. Rubbing the clay between her fingers, on her clothes, and body, she enters into a relationship with it. The clay is then transformed into three domes, laid together on a bed of cedar. Moon cycles adorn the vessels, connecting the earthiness of the clay to the airiness of the cosmos, suggesting we are constantly tethered, held between earth and all that floats above it.
Social Media:
Instagram @alexjacobsblum
Anahita Norouzi Bio:
Anahita Norouzi is a multidisciplinary artist, originally from Tehran and active in Montreal since 2018. She holds advanced degrees in Fine Arts and Graphic Design from Concordia University in Montreal. Her practice is research-driven, derived from marginalized histories, with a particular focus on the legacies of botanical explorations and archeological excavations, especially when scientific research became entangled in the colonial exploitation of non-Western geographies.
Articulated across a range of mediums and materials including sculpture, installation, photography, and video, her work interrogates different cultural and political perspectives on the human and non-human “other,” underlining the complex space between conflicted state of displaced people, plants, and cultural artifacts, and the responsibilities of the host country.
Norouzi’s work have been shown internationally, including BIENALESUR, the International Contemporary Art Biennial of South America (Buenos Aires), Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto), Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. She has received numerous grants, fellowships, and awards, most notably, the Grantham Foundation Creation Award, Liz Crockford Artist Fund Award, the Vermont Studio Center Merit. She is the winner of Contemporary art award of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (2023) and Impressions residency at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2022), and the finalist for the Magic of Persia Contemporary Art Prize and the prestigious Sobey Art Award (2023).
Artwork Description:
May You Break Free and Outlast Your Enemy confronts us with the case of Persia’s ancient Elamite city of Susa, whose 5,000-year-old ruins were, from the 19th century on, stripped of part of their heritage by French archaeologists funded by the Louvre. This ancestral territory has also been the focus of considerable colonial interest because of its rich petroleum deposits.
Stuck today in a sort of museum limbo, these heads were originally intended to protect and guide the ancestors of the Iranian people as they descended into the netherworld. The head’s cheek is laid against the floor, and from its almond-shaped eyes, enhanced with bitumen, flows what looks like a pool of petrol.
Artist’s Website Text:
May You Break Free and Outlive Your Enemy confronts us with the case of Persia’s ancient Elamite city of Susa, whose 5,000-year-old ruins were, from the 19th century on, stripped of part of their heritage by French archaeologists funded by the Louvre. This ancestral territory has also been the focus of considerable colonial interest because of its rich petroleum deposits. Many artifacts uncovered during the French excavations have ended up in the Louvre’s collections, including several Elamite funerary heads. Stuck today in “a sort of museum limbo,” these heads were originally intended to protect and guide the ancestors of the Iranian people as they descended into the netherworld.
For this work, the artist has made a large-scale clay copy of one of these heads. Despite its monumental enlargement, the delicacy of the material has enabled her to capture the fragile, even damaged look of the original. The head’s cheek is laid against the floor, and from its wide, almond-shaped eyes – enhanced with bitumen, according to the Elamite craft tradition – flows what looks like a pool of petrol.
The head is surrounded by ten imperial fritillaries made of black glass, reproduced life-sized. These flowers, characterized by their “upside-down” nectaries, are among the most ancient of Iran’s ornamental plants and have graced Europe’s most celebrated gardens since the 15th century. According to Iranian folklore, their nectar, dubbed “tears of Siyâvash,” is produced as the plant weeps in mourning for the departed. This installation-monument, which commemorates the vestiges of the city of Susa that vanished as the Iranian people looked on helplessly, represents for Norouzi a first step toward collective healing.
Social Media:
Instagram @Anahita_norouzi
Gabi Dao Bio:
Gabi Dao (they/them) is an artist from the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations (Vancouver, Canada) who has been living in Rotterdam, The Netherlands for the past few years.
Dao’s practice culminates in collage, sculpture, sound and moving image installations with an insistence on multiple truths, blurry temporalities, sensory affirmations and ways of knowing otherwise. They work through long-gestating, fluid processes of gathering, breaking and repairing from their own world-making vernacular of audio/visual fragments, tactile collections of whatnots and scraps of linguistic detritus. Thinking with these materials, their work often begins within the slippages of ‘history’, archives and storytelling— towards channeling the ineffable tensions between grief and joy, alienation and belonging, dissidence and complicity, disassociation and sentimentality. From this juncture, Dao attempts to reclaim and re-enchant meaning-making from the ruins of capitalism and colonialism, especially in the ways they have extracted from racialized, gendered and more-than-human communities.
They have screened and exhibited their work at E-flux Screening Room (Brooklyn, USA), Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin (Lethbridge, CA), A Tale-of-a-Tub (Rotterdam, NL), The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, CA) and Vincom Centre for Contemporary Art (Hà Nội, VN). They were recently in residence at Triangle Astérides (Marseille, FR), the EKWC (Oisterwijk, NL) and are a 2025 artist in residence at Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, NL).
Artwork Description:
The figure of the bat is the focal point of Gabi Dao’s solo exhibition What breaks on the horizon? Utilizing dramatic video installations, sculptural interventions, and a series of ceramic and textile marionettes, Dao considers the bat at a unique set of intersections between ecology and economy, pestilence and good fortune, sight and sound, and alienation and belonging. Utilizing the medium of the marionette, Dao’s bat marionettes are posed throughout the gallery and feature prominently in their videos, drawing upon a long history of puppetry as an educational, satirical, and transgressive dramatic medium.
The feature moving image work of this exhibition is titled Lucifer Falls from Heaven at Dawn, narrated by a bat marionette named Lucifer who falls to Earth at the foot of Turtle Mountain in Blairmore, Alberta. The collapsed limestone mountain is a shattered backdrop for Lucifer’s journey through the vestiges of resource extraction and settler colonialism on the prairies. Lucifer’s journey moves over land and through time on a journey to find the Others, the other bat species that Lucifer seeks to reconnect with. Along the way, Lucifer encounters biologists who are also searching for the Others but with technologies that heighten their audio and visual abilities.The videos and the exhibition as a whole not only question how conservation efforts determine what beings deserve our resources and protection, but the intentions of conservation more broadly. Dao points to a tension between the motives of ecological protection and saviourism, critiquing the dominance of Enlightenment thinking, the scientific method, Christian theology, value, and redemption.
Social Media:
Instagram @postdao
Hannah Faas Bio:
Hannah Faas is an emerging ceramic artist from Hamilton, Canada. She earned her Bachelor of Craft and Design in Ceramics from Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario in 2022, and her Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics from Kent State University in Kent, Ohio in 2024. Hannah is currently a 2024-2025 long-term Artist-in-Residence at LUX Center for the Arts in Lincoln, Nebraska. Her work explores themes of femininity, domesticity, sweetness, and frivolity and challenges the perception that sweet and frivolous things are submissive, naive, unprofessional, and overall lacking value. Her work confidently embraces these themes to undermine and challenge stereotypes through unapologetic conviction tempered with a sense of humour. She is a 2023 Craft Ontario Emerging Ceramic Artist award recipient and received first place in the AX National Emerging Ceramic Artists Exhibition in 2023. Her work has been featured in Fusion Magazine and Ceramics Monthly. Hannah has exhibited work in Canada and internationally in the United States.
Artwork Description:
This collection of work is from Hannah Faas’ 2024 MFA thesis show, Semisweet and Sweat. Her work explores themes of femininity, domesticity, sweetness, and frivolity, and challenges the perception that sweet and frivolous things are submissive, naive, unprofessional, and overall lacking value. The work takes inspiration from home interiors, desserts, and celebratory decorations and traditions, and makes use of a sense of humour to confidently embrace and challenge stereotypes surrounding domesticity, sweetness, and frivolity. Each of the works is handbuilt using coils and is mid fired to cone 1, after which mixed media, including foil leaf, tinsel, and glitter, are applied. Glaze and gold lustres sit alongside mixed media; coming together to create pastel adorned sculptures that confidently embrace these themes.
Social Media:
Instagram @hannah.faas
Julie Moon Bio:
Julie Moon is a Toronto based ceramic artist. Her dedication to her practice is motivated by material and process. The universality and tactile qualities of working with clay offers a refreshing contrast to our screen-dominated lives.
The surface of her sculpture and vessel works is a canvas for expressing individualism and diversity. Julie often draws from popular culture, using an accessible visual language that resonates with broad audiences. Her work pays homage to the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 70’s and 80’s, while embracing the inclusive spirit of the 1960’s and 70’s counterculture movement.
Julie has received numerous artist grants and participated in several artist residencies and teaching opportunities around the globe.
Artwork Description:
This group of clay sculptures examines notions of beauty and strength through larger than life flowers. These sturdy and expressive plants challenge expectations of fleeting and fragile beauty. Instead, these figurative flowers are a testament to endurance and strength, inviting viewers to reconsider and celebrate unexpected expressions of being.
Social Media:
Instagram @juliemoooon
Linda Sormin Bio:
Born in Bangkok, Thailand, Linda Sormin moved to Canada with her family at the age of five. She currently lives and works in New York City. Combining writing, video, sound and handcut paintings with clay, metal and wood, her recent largescale ceramic and mixed media installations include Stream at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, (2021-23), and Boru Sibaso Paet, on the foam of the primordial sea at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2023). Sormin’s first solo museum exhibition will open in October 2025 at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto.
Advocating for decolonial approaches in art and education since the early 1990s, when she worked in community development in Laos, she has since taught ceramics and visual art at Emily Carr University, Rhode Island School of Design, Sheridan College, Alfred University, and currently New York University, where she is a tenured Associate Professor of Studio Art and Head of Ceramics. She holds a BA in English (Andrews University,1993), a Diploma in Ceramics (Sheridan College, 2001) and an MFA in Ceramic Art (Alfred University, 2003).
Sormin’s work is included in private and public collections including the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (Boston, MA), Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC), Gardiner Museum (Toronto, ON), CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art (Middelfart, Denmark), Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY), Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK), Arizona State University Museum, (Tempe, AZ), World Ceramic Exposition (Gyeonggi Province, Korea), and Alfred Ceramic Art Museum (Alfred, NY).
Artwork Description:
Sormin’s handbuilt ceramic sculptures embody the vulnerable and fragmentary nature of her Thai-Chinese-Indonesian diasporic experience. Since the early 2000’s, she established a distinct visual and material language, using raw clay, fired ceramics, found objects, and interactive approaches. While participating in the contemporary art dialogue for over 20 years, Sormin’s recent research and writing shed new light on how her work – particularly the use of found and appropriated ceramics – has always been part of a continuum of cultural practices in her Batak Indonesian family history.
Social Media:
Instagram @lindasormin
Lindsay Montgomery Bio:
Lindsay Montgomery is a Toronto-based artist working across a variety of media including ceramics, painting and puppetry to create objects, and performances. Her work is focused on creating mythologies that confront and re-imagine classical narratives to address a wide range of topics and issues including: death and mysticism, feminism, and evolving modes of power. She earned a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and received her MFA from the University of Minnesota.
Artwork Description:
For Time Isn’t Real, I’m pleased to include a selection of new works from my new series titled Despairware, which references books of demonology and iconographies of feral femininity with Staffordshire figurines from the 19th century to tell much more personal narratives of my past and present relationship with the hinterland and its creatures, altered states of consciousness, and family histories and trauma.
Social Media:
Instagram @lindsay_s_montgomery
Manuel Mathieu Bio:
Born in Haiti, Manuel Mathieu is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal. He is best known for his vibrant, colourful paintings, which deftly merge abstraction and figuration. His paintings materialise the instability of forms, perpetual movement and a sense of pareidolia – our urge to see patterns where none exist.
Mathieu suggests that global dynamics can manifest in a single place, with Haiti as the site of his own inquiries.He highlights the shared links and struggles that unite us despite national borders. Where he approaches political themes, he does so from a personal perspective, through reflections on solitude, death, survival and desire.
His work explores our intertwined lives, in which the lines between past and present, personal and political, are often blurred. While he shares memories of his own life experiences, such as a convalescence following a serious accident, Mathieu also blends into his canvases a reckoning with the complex history of his homeland. He confronts questions that remain as urgent today as they have been throughout Haiti’s long history, unearthing the traumas of state violence. His work offers a space of reflection on Haiti’s history while inviting us to imagine its possible futures.
Mathieu’s concern for spatial organization, evident in his solo exhibitions at the MOCA Miami, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, The Power Plant in Toronto, K11 in China, and De La Warr Pavilion in the U.K., has now become the work itself, allowing the artist to explore Haitian culture and the major themes of his artistic investigation in all their physicality.
Artwork Description:
Thinking With the Figure invites viewers into a contemplative landscape, an archipelago of concepts where the mind wanders freely to form an oniric narrative. Each fragment floats beyond the constraints of physical dimension, resonating with each other rather than confining. In this installation, the figure emerges as a delicate synthesis of liberated shapes, a visual metaphor for the mind’s nonlinear, fluid nature. Mathieu Mathieu explores the inner terrains of contemplation, crafting a space where thoughts and feelings shape a vibrant yet intangible experience.
Social Media:
Instagram @manuelmathieu
ORXSTRA Bio:
Lifting its sensibility from the harmonic energy of the orchestral, the symphonic, and the mythological, ORXSTRA is an artistic partnership oriented toward communion and ceremony. Engaging deeply with body, mind, and spirit, ORXSTRA is inspired by extravagant artifice, the supernatural, and the awe-inspiring transcendent beauty of nature.
Founded in 2022 by Tala Kamea and Alexander McLeod, collaboration is at the heart of ORXSTRA’s creative process. ORXSTRA works with musicians, sound designers, visual artists, and other creative minds to craft immersive, multi-sensory experiences brought to life through various mediums. ORXSTRA is a project in time, open and adapting to change in the form of temporal Offerings: wearable pieces, music, art, and designed experiences.
Artwork Description:
CONVERGENCE is an immersive exploration that blends art and theoretical science. This work seeks to envision the nature of ceramics on other worlds and traces their origin in the forces of the universe, their voyage, and return to their elements. Through 3D animation, the video provides a contemplative moment—a reflection on the beauty of materials that journey through the cosmos, laden with possibilities and mysteries. CONVERGENCE is a poetic ode to our connection with the universe, inviting us to explore this enigma through art. It resonates with the timeless bond between celestial bodies and universal elements, offering a moment of transcendence.
Social Media:
Instagram: @orxstra_
Roy Caussy Bio:
Roy Caussy; b. 1981 (Hamilton, ON). Caussy received his BFA from NSCAD University, in 2006, and his MFA from the University of Lethbridge, in 2015. Caussy has been included in group exhibitions across North America, including The San Diego Art Institute, Cambridge Galleries, and Centre A, and has had solo exhibitions at Stride Gallery (Only the Losers; 2019), and the Art Gallery of Alberta (The King is Dead…; 2020). Having participated in numerous residencies across Canada, including The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Caussy has also received various public grants, including from the Canada Council for the Arts. Currently, Roy is an artist-in-residence at the Medalta International Artist-in-Residence Program where he is working towards his upcoming solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.
Artwork Description:
Two Birds Throwing Two Stones.
The making was the purpose – is the meaning – the act of using your time towards such an activity devoid of any specific outcome other than the want to, and the intuition to, say “yes”. The meaning is not in the ideas, but it is in who we are and what we did. That this is what we chose to do with our time and our energy. For two completely different people to find a way to create something together is to have the meaning in the connection, quite literally, not just the connection between artists but more specifically in the connection of their ceramic forms. It is the act of trying to connect, of making disparate ideas, and techniques, and practices and intentions, connect. We are two separate people making two completely different things, and we used our time and our energy to connect on something useless.
I just thought it would be nice to step outside of my practice and to engage with someone else in a creative way. Glenn always struck me as an interesting person who makes interesting art, and I thought I could learn a thing or two from him, while we explore a creative project together.
Social Media:
Instagram @r_caussy
Shanie Tomassini Bio:
Shanie Tomassini is a sculptress and her work explores the cyclical and renewable potential of objects, sites and ideas. Evoking sustainability, craftsmanship and ecofeminism, she hints at the sacred emerging from the mundane. She examines the nature of a material, reflecting on its evolution across space and time. Exploring the potent aftermaths of an existential crisis, her ideas often crystallize around a shape that becomes a motif for poetic emancipation.
Shanie completed an MFA in sculpture from the University of Texas at Austin in 2019. She has since presented several solo exhibitions, namely at Clark Center (Montreal), at the UMLAUF Museum (Austin), and at CIRCA art actuel (Montreal). Her work was also shown at the PHI Foundation (Montreal), Arsenal Contemporary (New York), Patel Brown Gallery (Toronto and Montreal), Tenerife Espacio de las Artes (Spain), and Artpace (San Antonio). She is a current fellow at the Darling Foundry in Montreal completing a 3 year residency (2023-2026) and was recently a resident at Est-Nord-Est Center (Saint-Jean-Port-Joli) and at Rad’Art Project in San Romano (Italy). In the last year, Tomassini was awarded two public art commissions that will be installed in 2025 in Quebec.
Artwork Description:
Shanie Tomassini’s work explores the cyclical and renewable potential of objects, sites and ideas. The metal structure articulates itself as a poetic and architectural binder between each object. The ball chain and semi-precious stones orient the eye and trace soft energetic lines between each fragment of the piece. The installation hints at the sacred emerging from the mundane. In her works, the artist examines the nature of a material, reflecting on its evolution across space and time. She sources symbols from her everyday that she interprets as divination throughout her sculptures and drawings.
Social Media:
Instagram @shanietom
Thomas Haskell Bio:
Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, Thomas Haskell came to Canada for his BFA at York University, followed by an MFA at OCAD University. Since becoming obsessed with ceramics, he has exhibited his work internationally, been one of NCECA’s emerging artists, and appeared on season 1 of The Great Canadian Pottery Throwdown. He is a self-taught ceramic artist who has taught ceramics and pottery in various capacities for the last fourteen years with a deep love for working with children, teens, and adults to facilitate their experience with clay. Thomas is heavily influenced by his Caribbean heritage and is constantly inspired by the natural world.
Artwork Description:
The heliconia flower has been with me my entire life. Each bract that hangs down seems to encapsulate its own world, over time they form anew below, while the previous bracts slowly age and decay. Not just a beautiful flower but a beautiful reminder of the path of time. In Hell, Can I? each bract is imagined as periods of time, moments of fear, of love, and of potentiality. To me, time is an unreal flower, opening ever downward.
Social Media:
Instagram @tshaskell
Suzanne Carte Bio (Curator):
Suzanne Carte is an award-winning curator and cultural producer living in Toronto, Canada. She is the Artistic Director/Curator at the Art Gallery of Burlington (AGB), an institution at the intersection of contemporary art and craft and the founder of the Artist Material Fund (AMF), a solid waste management service that redirects the arts sectors’ trash away from the landfill to provide raw working material for artists.
Previously, she was the Assistant Curator at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) focusing on the integration of exhibitions and public programming for over a decade. Within her independent practice, she has curated exhibitions in public spaces, artist-run centres, and commercial and public art galleries. Suzanne holds an MA in Contemporary Art History from Sotheby’s Art Institute in New York.
Dry Thunder – Artist and Curator Bios
Misbah Ahmed Bio:
Misbah Ahmed is a multidisciplinary artist whose primary mediums are oil painting and ceramic sculpture. Her work merges research on historical non-Western crafts and artifacts with a dedication to environmental themes, reflecting her growing concern for ecological issues. Drawing from both research and personal experiences, Ahmed’s work documents the lives of marginalized communities, particularly those within the Pakistani and broader South Asian diaspora, as well as the pressing climate crisis in Pakistan. By examining themes of duality, shifting cultural landscapes, and the nuances of everyday human experience, Ahmed aims to sustain and extend generational practices, using them to reconnect with ancestral landscapes and cultural heritage. Ahmed has a background in illustration design and holds a Bachelor of Design from OCAD University.
Sarah Edo Bio (Curator):
Sarah Edo is a curator and writer born and based in Toronto. Edo has curated exhibits and programs with BAND Gallery, Images Festival, Whippersnapper Gallery, Lakeshore Arts and, through her Curatorial Residency, with the Gardiner Museum. Edo is currently a Curatorial Fellow at the Toronto Biennial of Art. Her art writing has been featured in BlackFlash Magazine, C Magazine, Gallery 44, Studio Magazine, Topical Cream, among others. Edo holds a Masters in Gender studies, and a Bachelor of Arts in Gender and Cinema studies from the University of Toronto