Collective City Gallery Project at Dupont Rail 1444 Dupont St. #10, Toronto
Gallery Hours: 12 pm to 5 pm,
Wednesday to Sunday
Reception: Wednesday March 25
Artist Talk and Craft Session: Saturday, April 4, 12 – 2 pm
Single Served is an installation celebrating objects we hold sacred in our normal routines; from essentials to vices, things we buy, use, and then immediately discard. I see what has become litter as captured moments that feel like home, when finding home has become increasingly precarious. Pigeons and trash serve as symbols of single use domestication, created in porcelain to re-examine how we determine value of our everyday encounters and surroundings.
Fresh Slice, 2026, Glazed and Natural Porcelain, 32w x 24d x 10hUnder the Bridge, 2026, Glazed and Natural Porcelain, 30w x 30d x 9hChip Off the Block, 2025, Glazed and Natural Porcelain, 18w x 13d x 13hDetoured, 2025, Glazed and Natural Porcelain, 30w x 24d x 16h
FLOWCHANGE is a group exhibition that unfolds as a mixed-reality biome, where distinctions between the real and the rendered begin to blur. In this exhibition, nature is not something to be recovered or restored, but something continuously re-authored through technology, imagination, and lived experience.
Bringing together Toronto-based artists Alex McLeod, Laura Kay Keeling, Diana Lynn VanderMeulen, Sabrina Ratté, Willy Le Maitre, Ali Phi, Quinn Hopkins, and Amanda Amour-Lynx, FLOWCHANGE presents new works that explore how immersive media, projection, extended reality, data, and digital materiality can reshape our understanding of ecology, memory, and presence. Across the exhibition, digital environments feel inhabitable and intimate rather than representational. Alex McLeod approaches simulated space through the perspective of the non-player character, foregrounding overlooked viewpoints and ambient agency within constructed worlds. Laura Kay Keeling recomposes fragments of the natural and domestic through collage to form ecosystems shaped by augmentation, play, colour, and accumulation. Diana Lynn VanderMeulen extends spatial sensibility through sculptural video works as atmospheric environments where light, water, and air exist in constant transition.
A positioning of environment and transformation continues in Sabrina Ratté’s PHARMAKON, an interactive installation in which a printed herbarium becomes a gateway to a liminal virtual garden. Drawing from speculative ecology, natural sciences, and occult traditions, the work explores the unstable boundary between remedy and poison. Willy Le Maitre engages immersion through a new virtual reality work from his ongoing investigation of the inhabited image, situating participants within a fragmented panoramic landscape at the surface of the Humber River, where physical surroundings bleed into recorded nature through shifting light and spatial sound.
Moving from landscape to memory and identity, Ali Phi works with data-driven memory visualization, translating personal and collective data into immersive visual and sonic forms that reflect on how memory is stored, abstracted, and re-experienced through digital systems. Quinn Hopkins bridges Indigenous futurism and extended reality through tactile, motion-activated works that weave ancestral knowledge with contemporary technology, activating digital space as a living, responsive environment. Amanda Amour-Lynx leads the exhibition toward care and relationality, engaging speculative digital forms through practices grounded in kinship, softness, and collective nurturing.
Rather than resolving the relationship between nature and technology, FLOWCHANGE holds them together as a shared terrain. The exhibition invites viewers to slow down, linger, and feel through shifting ecologies where perception softens, time stretches, and care emerges as a collective practice.
Loudest Sound, a collection of recent works by Ali Sheikh, articulates a collision between information, noise, and affective experience. The cultural privileging of the visual against our simultaneous reliance on the auditory is explored through oil painting and site-responsive installation. Informed by personal reference points and frameworks of the sublime and phenomenology, this series considers how listening, musical structures, and sensory dissonance shape human connection.
Artist Statement:
Ali Sheikh (b. 2001) is a painter and illustrator working in Toronto. Sheikh received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from OCAD University in 2024. His current practice is tethered to questions of emotional conduits and our transfixation with sound. He seeks to express the intensities of life through oil paint, ink, pencil, and found object.
Ali Sheikh
Down from the ceiling, how far, 2025. Oil on canvas. 4’ x 5’Guido, 2025. Oil on canvas. 4’ x 3’Panorama, 2025. Oil on canvas. 18” x 24”Until the timing is felt and understood, 2025. Oil on canvas. 30” x 24”Waltz II, 2025. Oil on canvas. 3’ x 4’Whistleblower, 2025. Oil on canvas. 3’ x 4’Photos by Lily Todorov
Something Is Missing is a solo exhibition by Toronto-based Iranian artist Mahsa Merci that examines the queer body as abject and divided, shaped by forces that demand coherence yet punish its possibility. Drawing from Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection—the collapse of boundaries between self and object—the exhibition considers how identity fractures when difference is cast as disorder.
For Merci, this fragmentation is a lived experience. In Iran, where queerness is criminalized, the self must splinter to survive, surfacing only in gestures, disguises, and distortions. In her paintings, sculptures, and installations, fragmentation becomes a way to reorder the self, inhabiting spaces where coherence cannot hold.
Faces layered with heavy makeup, mirrored surfaces that warp reflection, and shoes bristling with eyelashes unsettle the idea of beauty, revealing its proximity to unease and its entanglement with control. Across these works, abjection becomes both method and mirror, exposing the psychic cost of forced conformity while revealing what persists beyond it.
Here, abjection is not only a site of exclusion but a ground for introspection. Merci’s work dwells within the unresolved, tracing what remains when wholeness slips away.
This exhibition follows, Land/Mind, presented this past May and June at Blouin Division gallery in Toronto, and continues that series of oil, acrylic and watercolour paintings produced since 2021 until now.
These recent paintings appear to be landscapes, trees, plants, water and sky, yet they do not represent any particular scene or location. I don’t want the images to be narrative or about anything specific. They reference the earthly and the terrestrial, but are from a different world. I aspire to conjure atmosphere or ambience – an energy or pulse that resonates poetically within the spirit or the imagination.
David Liss is a practicing artist, and an independent curator and writer living in Toronto.
David has been practicing and exhibiting his work since the late 1980s, and ongoing through a career as a museum and institutional director, curator, producer, and writer.
untitled, 2025 Oil on canvas 24x18in/61x48cm untitled, 2025 Oil on canvas 18x24in/48x61cm
Collective City 