The Collective City Gallery Project received over 225 submissions for the 2026 season. With a limited number of exhibition slots in the calendar, our jury worked hard to select eight exhibitions.
Jan 20 – Feb 2 Ali Sheikh ‘Loudest Sound’
These works will reflect on the deep-rooted, often wordless connection between siblings as analogous to musical harmony—simultaneously structured and spontaneous, dissonant and tender. I am interested in how sound can embody relational energy: like melody, family relationships repeat, evolve, clash, and resolve. This body of work will consider sound and its intrinsic relation to human nature, and the idea of a musical instrument as a conduit for emotion. Harmonic structures and frequencies mirror the lived experience; somehow composed of literal, concrete, existent sounds and inflections, but also dripping in context and intensely intimate value from person to person. Imagery from personal and external archives will be referenced, balancing raw, candid moments with playful intensity and charm.
Feb 17 – Mar 2 Miriam Arbus ‘Pluvial Runoff’
Artists Annette Mangaard and Nathan Bruce and curator Miriam Arbus, propose Pluvial Runoff, an interactive site-specific installation that challenges viewers to reflect on our current climate crisis. This immersive exhibition will invite active participation through motion-responsive experiences, utilizing cutting-edge tools like TouchDesigner to merge video projection mapping, point-cloud photography, sculptural elements, and a dynamic soundscape. Water and mylar sculptures cast light reflections, enhancing the immersive environment.
Mar 24 – Apr 6 Jes Young ‘Single Serve’
Single Serve is an installation celebrating things we hold sacred in our normal routines; from essentials to vices, these things we buy, use, and then immediately discard; allowing for urban wildlife to discover and thrive. I want to explore these mundane moments: a drink at a bar, coffees in the park, lunch in the office, the grocery run; moments where people have enjoyed, finished, and trashed the remaining objects without
much thought, leaving them to landfill or for urban wildlife. I will recreate the leftovers of these moments throughout the gallery, with local urban wildlife, pigeons, skunks, and other birds, enjoying themselves with the leftovers. This will all be made in porcelain, giving the ability to recreate specific textures, colours and patterns of each and every individual object.
May 19 – Jun 1 Orest Tataryn curated by Lois Andison ‘Bright Lights’
A colourist at heart, Orest’s signature works are colour studies that combine mathematics with pattern, abstraction, and the precise placement, proportions, and relationships of chroma. His process often involves cutting sections of glass tube (some phosphor-coated and uncoated coloured glass), then fusing the different sections, then repeating this technique with minor variations over a number of tubes to create
a colour field. The proposed exhibition will present both large-scale works and smaller works, many of which are undocumented. What is presented in the images is representative of the span of his practice but does not fully reflect what will be exhibited.
Jun 16 – 29 Margaret Glew ‘Burning Fire Blues’
An exhibition of my recent large-scale abstractions. As I head into what may well be my last decade of life, I find myself thinking a lot about what painting means to me. Painting has been the driving force of my life for decades now. It has given voice so to speak to the deep feelings that are difficult for me to put into words. I came up with the title Burning Fire Blues because it says in a few words a lot about the ideas and feelings expressed in my work.
Aug 18 – 31 Jim Bravo ‘It Took an age Or Two To Get Home’
I have been working on a catalogue of works reflecting both my family’s early Black immigrant inner-city experiences in 1970s and 1980s Toronto, and my love for our sublime Canadian landscape. It is my mission to continue to help transform the homes, streets, and neighbourhoods of our provinces into living galleries of art.
Sept 22 – Oct 5 Hannah Somers “The Music Sang ‘Lean On Me'”
This submission to Collective City Arts is to seek the display of the series The Music Sang ‘Lean On Me’. My photography has tackled subjects around mixed ethnicity, culture, family, identity and heritage. I have worked through these subjects using both new imageries, archival imagery, video and collage to express the complicated and often confusing dynamics that come with biracial families.
Nov 17 – 30 Jason van Horne/Brian Donnelly
Brian Donnelly: “Goin’ Down The Road” is an exhibition of video works that explore the city of Toronto through the lens of fiction. Positioned somewhere between piracy and cartography, my work recontextualizes fragments of film footage to shift focus from foreground narrative to background geography. What emerges are surreal documentations of a city evolving over decades, posing questions about the distortion of social identity and contesting the ownership of recorded municipal history.
Jason van Horne: ” The City” During the pandemic I had the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it on my mind a lot. While apocalyptic themes have often been a part of my miniature work, the doomsday clock seemed to be getting especially close to midnight. So I started collecting the numerous boxes from online shopping that were coming to our house at the time and turning them into abandoned office towers, crumbling apartment buildings and burnt-out storefronts.
