See Past Shows

Gagné Contemporary is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Jane Forrest – “gentle enough to hold”. Opening Thursday, July 3 from 6-8pm, the show will run to August 2, 2025.

Preparing for this exhibition, Jane writes – “I’ve been thinking about spaces that don’t demand language: the stillness of a subway car at night, the silence of windows, the charged quiet of domestic rooms. These are not empty — they’re landscapes. They hold memory, grief, intimacy. In these spaces, colour becomes a way to speak of time. Blues hold centuries. White fractures light. Pigment becomes temperature. A grid becomes a system. Painterly gestures become velocities.”

The title of the show, “gentle enough to hold” is a line from the poem The Bull, by Ocean Vuong from his book Time Is A Mother. Jane has been thinking about beauty, not as an answer but as an entrance. For the artist, these are not necessarily representational works, but openings, spaces that invite entry, feeling and reflection.

The paintings, ceramics, mosaics, prints and drawings produced across her second year at Cooper Union are all of a piece – shaped through sustained labour, built out of literary, political and personal references.

Augusta X. Thomson (BA, Archaeology & Anthropology, Oxford University) has written an essay on Jane’s work for this exhibition. In it she writes – “Jane uses colour to bring time-scapes together—to make the past a dream of the future and the future a dream of the past. The bright blues and pinks and purples imbue her paintings with a surreal, almost enchanted quality. Are we really on a subway in Brooklyn, or in a fairytale contained within the mind of that subway? Where does what we know to be true end and begin? Her colour palette fantastically disrupts our sighted expectations.”

And further, Augusta writes – “gentle enough to hold” is a vital exploration of the ways that spaces, places, people, and memories held in suspension, speak. It is a compilation with a life in and beyond colour and material that asks what it means to dream worlds into existence that hold new possibilities for the ways we can communicate with each other. And it is the voice of a seer-as-artist who refuses to give up on finding hope in the world.”

Jane Forrest (b. 2005) is an artist and curator based in New York City and Toronto. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Her practice explores labour as a form of endurance, employing labour-intensive processes across a range of mediums to examine themes of memory, loss, and history. She has exhibited her work at the Orillia Museum of Art & History, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and the Royal Ontario Museum. She was a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation artist grant in 2024.