Sights of Convergence

Opening: Sept. 20, 2 - 5 pm

Location: Varley Art Gallery, Main Gallery

216 Main Street Unionville, Markham, Ontario, L3R 2H1

Artists: Jess Riva Cooper, Gabriela García-Luna, and Stanzie Tooth

Curators: Anik Glaude and Yuluo Wei

Sights of Convergence features work by Jess Riva Cooper (Toronto, ON), Gabriela García-Luna (Saskatoon, SK), and Stanzie Tooth (Toronto, ON). Each artist brings a distinct material practice and set of concerns to their work, yet all explore the intimate entanglement of human and natural worlds. Rather than treating nature as a passive backdrop, their works invite us to consider a more nuanced, reciprocal exchange, one shaped by perception, memory, and lived experience. Beneath the surface, unsettling realities emerge: anxiety, tension, loss, and the shadow of ecological catastrophe. In this shared space, the gallery becomes a meeting ground, where diverse expressions converge and conversations between works and ideas can take root, grow, and expand.

The exhibition opens with Gabriela García-Luna’s large-scale installation. Merging digital and analogue printing techniques, García-Luna creates works rooted in her lived experience of the land. Originally from Mexico, she documents elements of the Canadian landscape as a way of experiencing and better understanding her new home. She reworks these observations, layering images of flora from various sources without concern for recreating reality as it appears. Instead, García-Luna uses her source material to investigate nature beyond the limits of the naked eye, capturing its essence and fostering a reconnection to the land.

Seeking to disrupt traditional depictions of nature, Stanzie Tooth creates lush and detailed ink-painted landscapes on paper. Teeming with life, these works are adorned with rich foliage and flowers rendered in both black and coloured inks. Tooth’s worlds are imaginative composites, constructed from the artist’s memory and acquired knowledge, to reclaim a sense of belonging within the natural world. Figures populate Tooth’s scenes, appearing in shades of black ink—both part of and apart from nature. Themes of motherhood and the materiality of the natural world also emerge, their presence a source of quiet unease, adding layers of intimacy and connection.

In her clay-based sculptures, Jess Cooper reflects on the persistent, often unseen forces shaping our living environment. Using a range of techniques, glazes, and slips, she transforms organic forms, flowers, vines, and parasitic beings, creating tensions between the beautiful and the grotesque. Plants appear to overtake us, reclaiming space and adapting it for their own survival. Almost as a warning, Cooper’s work hints at a future where the boundaries between the human and the non-human threaten to coalesce.

Curated in response to Kejie Lin’s solo project in the adjacent gallery, the exhibition extends its inquiry, bringing together a plurality of voices and artistic approaches that reflect on the complexities of the environment we inhabit. Across the exhibition, the natural world is not merely observed—it is felt, remembered, and critically questioned.

Image above: Stanzie Tooth, Joined (After Manet), 2025, ink on premium watercolour paper, 30 x 44 inches diptych