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Gagné Contemporary is pleased to present TRANSMUTATION, an exhibition of painting, photography, ceramics, sculpture and video that explores radical change in flora and fauna as we (yes WE) morph into something strange yet beautiful.

The artists hail from Toronto, Canada and Milan, Italy – so please welcome Stephanie von Awesome, Carmen Mahave, Ramona Nordal, P. Elaine Sharpe, Jonah Strub, Alex Valentina and Emily Zou.

While Stephanie von Awesome’s project stems from her enjoyment of the absurd, it’s actually grounded in the art practices of the post-WWII artists’ collective COBRA (Pierre Alechinsky, Asjer Jorn, Karel Appel et al) and up through their intersection with the Situationist International – namely the co-opting and redirecting of existing works into something more aggressive, in fact, transgressive. How delicious to experience self-important, pompous Chanel and Saint-Laurent fashion ads, lifted out of Toronto bus shelters, now rendered monstrous and hilarious with Stephanie’s intervention.

Equally audacious is the work of Carmen Mahave, whose trio of unsettling life-like fictional creatures invite questions across a range of polarities. The largest creature, “Canichiroptalus”, blurs boundaries between human and non-human, the familiar we recognize, the beast we find disturbing. Carmen’s work challenges our assumptions of identity, otherness, belonging – against a social, biological and political backdrop we now recognize as one construct among many. Canny? Uncanny? Yes.

Ramona Nordal’s portraits of women seem to exist inside and outside time. Referencing 1800’s early photography and 1970s colour palettes, these stylish, elegant paintings present women adorned with patterns and textures that go beyond fashion, beyond an environment of colour and form, and into the skin. The restraint of these works – dispassionate faces, crisp painterly lines – tempts our emotional engagement. Strange yet beautiful, we fall for the mystery.

High above crashing waves, high enough on the mountain crag to be among the clouds, stands a young woman, her back toward us. Or are there two young women? Or more? In a frilled pink apron with puffy sleeves and little else, her partial nudity doesn’t help clarify the number of arms and legs we see. Is this desire? Has the surreal supplanted the real? Evoking Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic landscape and lone figure of “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog”, P. Elaine Sharpe has brought us her confection, painted in silver polymers and rose pigments on polylinen, expressly for this exhibition.

Only Loxanne Creamcheese, channelling artist Jonah Strub, could create this series of flamboyant ceramic creatures – a daring leopard print outfit meets a daring leopard, a tiger woman is indeed half tiger – with characteristic humour and style. Are these works of camp? Kitsch? Yes! Do they conflate Yiddish humour and drag? Yes! Are they as exuberantly beautiful as they are exuberantly strange? Yes, indeed.

Alex Valentina, working out of Milan, Italy, has created his very own world of biomorphic expression – flora and fauna from another world where liquid mercury and silver drip through psychedelic gardens, where mushroom and insect emerge alongside biological jewelry. Three gorgeous prints on aluminum, and a series of exquisite videos bring his exotic, alien ecosystem to life within our exhibition.

Finally, the artist Emily Zou is represented by three of her Dark Matter assemblages. Starting in 2020 with the pandemic’s global shutdown, Emily began work on this series by gathering the everyday objects around her, and then tying, twisting, folding and wrapping the materials onto metal frames. Tinted and stained in subdued metallic hues, the results seem alive, like biomechanical webs with viral minds of their own.