ROAD TRIP

Summer Group Exhibition

On view until September 6, 2025

Our summer group exhibition was inspired by one of our favourite summer pastimes: the road trip and the joy of exploration. The exhibition features works by gallery artists which will evolve throughout the summer, with new works introduced over time.

Currently displaying work by Alex Bierk, Jordan Broadworth, Joe Fleming, Graham Gillmore, Celia Neubauer, Stanzie Tooth, Renée Van Halm, Kate Wilson and Lyla Rye in the video space.

We are proud to introduce new works by Renée Van Halm in our summer group exhibition.

Renée Van Halm

Head Long Series, 2024 - 2025

Visual suggestions from the world of advertising conform with numerous expected ideals of beauty and youth. The phenomenon of finding faces in most simple of representations (pareidolia) is difficult to overcome. In this work I have started with silhouettes and then attempted to integrate them into abstract compositions while retaining the basic form and gesture of the pose. - Renée Van Halm

Cultural history and the ways we represent and inhabit the world through artistic interventions has long been central Renée Van Halm’s work. Over the years, she has explored subjects that reflect on art and design practices, engaging with the genres of still life and landscape, as well as decor, abstraction, and pattern. Van Halm is particularly drawn to the expectations and ideologies that underlie these aesthetic forms.

More than forty years ago, Van Halm began working with the architecture found in early Renaissance painting, constructing life-sized, three-dimensional structures inspired by those pictorial spaces. This led her to consider how architectural space shapes contemporary experience—how it frames the body, whether overtly visible or only implied. These concerns continue to inform her practice across painting, drawing, and, most recently, ceramics.

She draws imagery from her own photographs, printed matter, and internet sources, translating them through processes of manipulation and juxtaposition into new compositions that propose reconsidered meanings. Through this, she intends to question visual conventions and expose the layered politics embedded in form and space.

Her ongoing interests centre on the politics of space: who owns it, who occupies it, and how we, as individuals, define and negotiate our private and public identities within the environments we inhabit.

Born in the Netherlands, Renée Van Halm immigrated to Canada as a child. She currently lives and works in Vancouver, after extended periods in Toronto, Montréal, and Berlin. She studied at the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design) and holds an MFA from Concordia University in Montréal.

Van Halm has exhibited widely, with over 50 solo exhibitions and numerous group shows, including Making Space (Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 2020), Form Follows Fiction (UTAC, Toronto, 2016), The Poetics of Space (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2015), New Monuments Forget the Future (Birch Contemporary, 2015), and international exhibitions in Sydney and Tokyo. Her work is held in public and private collections internationally including the National Gallery of Canada.

A founding member of Mercer Union, Toronto’s artist-run centre (est. 1979), Van Halm has also made significant contributions as an educator. She taught at York University before joining the faculty at Emily Carr University, where she is now Professor Emerita.