RECENT Exhibitions
Luke Parnell
Skén:non akéhake tsi na’teiónteron / Remédiation relationnelle / Relational Remediation
May 23 - August 1, 2026
Luke Parnell, War Canoe PrototypeRe-Surfacing -Written by Lisa Myers
Relational Remediation brings together works by Luke Parnell that span before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, contrasting a video work made prior to the pandemic with works shaped during and after that period of isolation. This exhibition highlights how isolation intensifies a longing to gather and to re-surface after challenging times.
Luke’s development of games emerged during some of the most isolating periods of the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, he lived across the city from me and we would sometimes meet on Zoom and play a dice game. During that time online, I recall him describing in detail new game ideas. Even in solitary and isolating moments, Luke continued to make art by incorporating more digital drawing and design, though ‘making’ remained/s central to who he is as an artist.[1]
Luke’s first game release, 3 Ravenz (2023/24) is a trick-taking card game in the tradition of games such as Hearts or Euchre.[2] Central to the game is the presence of a trickster card. As Luke explains in the game’s instruction booklet, for “traditional peoples on the Northwest Coast of North America, the Raven is a supernatural being, a legend and a house.” The gameplay draws participants into the excitement of building momentum through collecting tricks, while the inherent unpredictability of a shuffled deck ensures that fortunes can shift suddenly. This balance between strategy and chance echoes the characteristics often associated with trickster narratives, where expectations are continually disrupted.
The game extends his artistic practice beyond the tabletop creating a shared experience that blurs the boundaries between art and the storytelling embedded in the game’s design. Moving from cards to board games, Luke reimagines tabletop play from 3 Ravenz as large printed versions of the card designs and also in his board game called War Canoe (2026) a print of the board design as a shared spatial experience of canoe races expanding the logic of games onto the gallery walls.
Deciphering and legibility are also concerns that I see in this work. The design of his prints invites shifts in perspective. The Wordle Equation (2026) references the popular web-based word game Wordle. This artwork draws on the familiar yellow and green colour scheme associated with the puzzle and rather than letters and words, sections of the image are gradually pieced together from top to bottom. Encouraging a visual literacy for animal motifs, ovoid and form-line.
Luke’s video Remediation (2018) follows the artist during a residency in Quebec, where he creates a large carved pole. Carving as knowledge is central here, Luke asserts that the knowledge involved in carving is most important. Emphasizing this further, he cuts the pole in half with a chainsaw and attaches backpack-style straps, enabling him to carry the upper section on his back. While the journey appears solitary, the performance also recalls forms of movement and visiting taken for granted before COVID-19 lockdowns altered everyday life.
In an epic performance for video, Luke travels by train and on foot to the west coast of Vancouver Island. Carrying the carved eagle throughout the journey, he then burns the carving on a rocky beach at the edge of the ocean.[3] Burning the carving reinforces the skills and knowledge embodied in its making. Fire, water, and wood come into play where flames resist and are tempered by rain. Remediation signals a collective and careful re-surfacing for all our relations.
Taken together, the video, games, and printed works reveal embedding as a central aspect of Luke’s practice. His cultural knowledge—and sense of play—is not simply represented but situated and asserted within materials, actions, objects, and relationships. Whether through carving, gameplay, or design, Luke creates structures that carry and activate knowledge, stories, and connections through participation, encounter, and collective experience, inviting others into shared acts of learning, play, and re-surfacing.
[1] Reflecting on Luke Parnell’s artistic drive to create: Luke once turned his kitchen in a Toronto apartment into a makeshift urban carving shed, showing how he can transform any space into his studio.
[2] “Indigenous board game designer brings culture into play,” CBC News, accessed June 1, 2026, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-indigenous-board-game-designer-1.7390397
[3] Lisa Myers, “Sounding and Readiness,” in Luke Parnell: Repeat the Chorus Three Times (exhibition catalogue, Varley Art Gallery, 2021), 17.
group exhibition co-curated by Kaia'tanó:ron Dumoulin Bush and Melanie Tangaere Baldwin
IOWERĀ:KAHRE / HAU MARANGAI / LE VENT HURLE / THE WIND IS HOWLING
July 4 - August 1, 2026
James Tapsell-Kururangi, James (2025), digital film stil, commissioned by CIRCUIT Artist Moving Image. Cinematographer Ralph Brown
ARTISTS:
Aotearoa: Piupiu Maya Turei, James Tapsell Kururangi, Maungarongo Te Kawa, Ngaroma Riley, Pepi - Joy Gilgen, p. Walters, Michelle Hinekura Kerr, Melanie Tangaere Baldwin
Turtle Island: Zoe Ann Cardinal Cire, Sierra Barber, Jay Havens, Megan Feheley, Kyle Kaientoton Williams, Kaia'tanoron Dumoulin Bush
This exhibition is the culmination of years of relationship building between daphne and the HOEA! Gallery in Gisborne, Aotearoa - two female led Indigenous contemporary art galleries on opposite sides of the world.
HOEA! was privileged to show the work of daphne founder Skawennati as part of a 2022 group exhibition - PŪMANAWA, this connection then led to members of HOEA! joining daphne beads / perler parler online, which led to a relationship with Kaia’tanò:ron.
Hau Marangai is the highest pitched sound that the koauau (Māori flute) can make, IOWERĀ:KAHRE refers to the howling wind. Both are a call across oceans. A conscious and hopeful address to a shared future.
“We have always intended to bring this exhibition to Turtle Island. The two iterations serve as introductions and conversations between Indigenous lands as much as between Indigenous artists.They function simultaneously as the call and response. This version is very different to the one held at HOEA! but at its heart it is the same.
“In hindsight, IOWERĀ:KAHRE speaks to the nature of this exhibition in multiple ways. While discussing our curatorial statement, Melanie and I found ourselves without wind in our sails. The ever increasing insanity in this world was, is, and will continue to be, baffling. We attempted to write an “interview style / conversation” style text but we would be hit with waves of despondency when thinking about the future. Our daily conversations were a mix of either crying faces or heart emojis. Not good reading material. It certainly didn’t help that, a few weeks ago, there was a very real possibility that this show would not happen. Even in our first iteration, the whole thing came down to a passport arriving on time. It seems that these days, our dreams hang by threads like a flag getting whipped around by the wind.” (Kaia’tanò:ron Dumoulin Bush)
“ ‘Hau Marangai’ was chosen as the Māori name for this show because it alludes to a storm and I didn't think that our stories could be carried across such big distances on gentle winds. They had too much to say and too far to go.
I have always been wary of the assumption of homogeneity among Māori, among Indigenous people in general. Of course we share beliefs and foundations, and we hopefully believe in and care for one another, but to expect a sameness flattens us in a way that is only useful to those who see themselves as our conquerors.
For me, these exhibitions have been about introducing ourselves, and sharing a glimpse into the breadth of who we really are. They are about building community and creating sincere and lasting relationships
The Aotearoa artists in IOWERĀ:KAHRE/Hau Marangai 1 and 2 , are very important contemporary representations of our many voices. They are artists who are conscious of their role and are unashamedly pushing forward and often against. They do this in a myriad of excellent ways without ever compromising their commitment to Matauranga Māori (the Māori worldview). I am incredibly proud and privileged to be able to share these works, these stories, at daphne.” (Melanie Baldwin)
We would like to thank everyone who has been a part of making this happen. Our ancestors, our tipuna, past, present and future, who have enabled us to be here.
We would also like to acknowledge all those who could not be here due to undesirable and unforeseen circumstances. They are our artists, gallery assistants, friends and whānau (family) from Aotearoa: Piupiu Maya Turei, James Tapsell Kururangi, Maungarongo Te Kawa, Ngaroma Riley, Pepi- Joy Gilgen, p. Walters, Carmel Salmanzadeh & Maia Keane, Michelle Hinekura Kerr and her family, Āio, Toki, Reuben and Keith
Emma Hassencahl-Perley
Tsík nón:we iekáhson / everywhere and completely
January 7 - April 18, 2026
A star, a glitch, a becoming
by rudi aker
In everywhere and completely, Emma Hassencahl-Perley undertakes an intentional recalibration, moving toward the restorative call of a self-determined artistic practice – a return to a creative center – while remaining engaged in her public and communal work as an accomplished muralist. From this balance between personal exploration and collective practice emerges a mode of making as relation, as orientation, as constellation – a delicate weaving of thought and gesture. Across a decade of work, this evolving lineage traces Emma’s engagement with mediating material and digital worlds, mapping networks of memory, and exploring the shifting terrains of nationhood, activism, and cultural sovereignty.
Guided by cultural practice, language, and relationality, the exhibition title draws from the Wolastoqey translation of possesom, meaning star: pos, everywhere; sesom, completely. This interplay situates Emma and her works within expansive, interconnected worlds, reflecting how stories, relationships, and communities stretch across time and extend across generations and geographies. Constellation is both methodology and metaphor. Through these stars, networks, and fragments, Emma engages with glitches, scattering images and words to unmake, create, and recreate. These disruptions serve as reminders of the pasts, presents, and futures that have and continue to hold us, enacted through the ongoing process of coming together to ensure our survivance and possibility.
Central to everywhere and completely is Emma’s new body of paintings, where digital experimentation and material practice converge. These works arise from glitched digital drawings that are projected, traced, and hand-painted. The painterly intervention produces surfaces that shimmer between clarity and distortion. Her aesthetic language, deeply informed by Wabanaki material and visual culture, is threaded with the double-curve motif, carrying ancestral knowledge into the future through contemporary digital storytelling, bridging memory, cultural inheritance, and innovation. In these paintings, the physical and digital, the de/colonial, and the traditional and contemporary intersect to explore relational and temporal multiplicities. Rather than emphasizing the loss or erosion inherent in digital processes, the works focus on transformation – how something altered can reveal new paths of meaning, despite their distortions; they refract rather than erase.
Through the lens of constellating, the glitch functions not merely as a visual strategy but as a conceptual framework. By fracturing, displacing, and reconfiguring, Emma unsettles fixed narratives, opening space to question and reimagine histories, memory, and cultural knowledge. This practice highlights how information, histories, and culture circulate across material and conceptual spaces, shaping networks that are never fixed but constantly evolving. It enacts Indigenous epistemologies that emphasize ethical, relational, and political responsibility, showing how making and remaking are inseparable from the work of remembrance, resistance, and cultural continuity.
Anchored in a lineage of care, Emma’s work is deeply interwoven with that of her grandmothers, elders, and the larger community of Neqotkuk (Tobique First Nation), whose teachings and activism form a steady undercurrent for her practice. This intergenerational thread is evident in two of the earlier works in the exhibition: White Flag (2015) and Ahtolimiye (She Keeps Praying) (2018), both of which incorporate shredded fragments of the Indian Act, embedding colonial documentation into the material as a means of unmaking, transforming, and reclaiming. The flag asks how symbols might be remade and how nationhood might be reconsidered, while the jingle dress, inspired by her great-grandmother Marjorie Perley’s ribbon dress, embodies resilience and the vitality of Wolastoqey cultural practice. From witnessing the activism of her matriarchs, Emma learned the rhythms of movement-building, grounded in persistence, care, and dialogue. In these works, her elders’ teachings persist, adapting across material and temporal landscapes to shape Emma’s practice as a continuum of cultural knowledge and intergenerational guidance.
Throughout the exhibition, friction and transformation act as generative forces. Digital and material, past and present, intersect to show how care, memory, and knowledge flows through interconnected networks. The works reflect both the possibilities and limitations of digital spaces, recognizing that online environments carry their own forms of cultural transmission, activism, and community building. Glitches and constellations serve as reminders that knowledge, culture, and activism are never fixed, they are continuously mediated, reassembled, and renewed, in a perpetual state of becoming. In fostering dialogue between this new body of work and earlier pieces, Emma Hassencahl-Perley embraces creation as a relational, iterative, and expansive act. everywhere and completely is a field of possibility and a vision of connection that expands in every direction – reminding us that transformation, like a constellation, is always forming, gently, everywhere, completely.
Jobena Petonoquot
Ni Mikawenindjgan Inàkonigewin / My Souvenir Ceremony
January 7 - April 18, 2026
Our Plastic Sisters
by Sherry Farrell Racette
More than a decade ago, I taught a class on Indigenous representation in museums and public spaces at Concordia University. We used artist Jeffrey Thomas’ seminal project, “Scouting for Indians”, as a strategy to explore how these critical issues impacted us as urban citizens.[1] We divided Montreal into sections, and each student began to scout for Indigenous representation. Jobena Petonoquot was a student in that class – she tackled Old Montreal. She reported on tacky souvenir shops, and brought a little doll dressed in “Indian” clothing to class. Jobena rescued the doll, and every Indigenous woman in the class related to her impulse to care for it.
Jobena’s visceral connection to souvenir dolls is rooted in the experience of being photographed as a living doll for a government poster in the 1980s. She was four years old, posed in a fringed dress, leather headband and turkey feather. The child became the doll. Souvenir dolls are a conundrum. Their stereotypical representations are perceived as authentic. They represent real people in damaging ways and impact public perception. Misrepresentation is toxic, but we feel sorry for our plastic sisters with their pursed lips and ridiculous clothing.
The impulse to rehabilitate and deploy the narrative power of dolls is shared by several Indigenous women artists. Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith made paper dolls. Skawennati has contemplated the unlikely pairing of Barbie Dolls and corn husk dolls.[2] Australian artist Destiny Deacon rescued a vast collection of highly problematic black dolls that she reframed and reanimated through photography.[3] In the case of My Souvenir Ceremony, an Algonquin-Anishnaabekwe artist prepares the dolls for burial, blesses and transforms them. She is a remedial presence who manipulates history and rearranges relations of power.
For a number of years, Jobena has explored the overlapping spaces between personal experience, history, and colonialism with a focus on the vulnerable bodies of children. Bonnets, clothing, and moccasins are recurring forms. She has crafted a visual vocabulary, a uniquely personal system of meaning that reaches into the complexities of Algonquin history, critiquing our centuries-long relationship with Catholicism, while holding up our resilience and deep knowledge of land, birds and animals. She draws from a wide range of materials, each carefully chosen for its narrative potential. Every choice is intentional: velvet, beads, lace, hide, furs, cheap plastic, and earth from her home community of Kitigan Zibi. Every stitch is an intervention. The soles of the funeral moccasins have different images: a doll and a dead chickadee. The memorial photograph is trimmed with healing cedar. At the foot of a casket, two beavers contemplate a cross. Curves emulate the undulating trim on birchbark baskets.
As a final step in the ceremony, Jobena dressed in the same garments she sewed for the dolls: a skirt, a bonnet trimmed with lace and muskrat fur, and a beaded collar. Unlike the funeral moccasins, on Jobena’s regalia the chickadees are alive, both a symbol of persistence and a reference to her mother’s home. In a series of staged photographs, the living doll walks the streets of Montreal, returns to the souvenir store and contemplates rows and rows of souvenir dolls. She bids them farewell, kneels at a church altar and offers a prayer. When she returns, her bonnet and collar are laid to rest among the dolls, who are carefully placed on fur. The Ceremony is done with love and gentle determination to restore balance. But the message is clear. Their time is over. RIP Our Plastic Sisters.
[1] Haudenosaunee artist Jeffery Thomas’ “Scouting for Indians’ (1992-2000) was a photo-documentation project based on “scouting” for representations of Indigenous people in urban spaces. It included statues, architectural elements, street signs, and graffiti. See Jeff Thomas, “Scouting for Indians”, https://jeff-thomas.ca/2014/04/ scouting-for-indians/.
[2] Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith, Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World (With Ensembles Contributed by the U.S. Government), 1991, Obj. No. 46.2023, Museum of Modern Art; Skawennati, “Generations of Play”, https://skawennati.com/projects/generations-of-play/.
[3] Stephanie Convery, “Destiny Deacon on humour in art, racism, 'Koori kitsch' and why dolls are better than people”, The Guardian, 23 November 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/nov/24/destiny-deacon-on-humour-in-art-racism-koori-kitsch-and-why-dolls-are-better-than-people.
rosalie mowatt
KA KIPAPINTISOTC
February 28 - March 13, 2026
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For Nuit Blanche 2026, daphne presents a suspended installation and projection of KA KIPAPINTISOTC (2024) by emerging artist rosalie mowatt. The work will be on view throughout the all-night event and will remain accessible for the following 13 nights.
The exhibition will officially open with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. in the gallery. Visitors are welcome to gather for tea and bannock and to enter the “fishbowl,” a glass room near the front window where the suspended installation is hung. Beginning at 5 p.m., the projection accompanying the work will be activated. The installation is interactive, and visitors will be invited to gently touch the suspended elements while reflecting on themes of identity, belonging, and self-understanding.
KA KIPAPINTISOTC is composed of black ribbons of varying lengths and widths, from which hang metal cones known as “jingles.” Traditionally found on dresses, these handmade jingles are each embossed with a word written in Anishinaabe or French. Together, they reflect mowatt’s ongoing exploration and dissection of her identity as both Anishinaabe and Quebecois. Suspended from the ceiling, the work appears to float in space. Positioned in the window the work will be visible from within and outside the gallery.
Alongside the installation, a mediation space will be set up where visitors can handle jingles and further engage with the material language of the work. At 7 p.m., the gallery will close, and the projection will continue and remain visible from the sidewalk throughout the night. A QR code accessible from outside will link to daphne’s website, offering additional information about the artist and the work for passersby and late-night visitors alike.
KA KIPAPINTISOTC
February 28 - March 13, 2026
For Nuit Blanche 2026, daphne presents a suspended installation and projection of KA KIPAPINTISOTC (2024) by emerging artist rosalie mowatt. The work will be on view throughout the all-night event and will remain accessible for the following 13 nights.
The exhibition will officially open with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. in the gallery. Visitors are welcome to gather for tea and bannock and to enter the “fishbowl,” a glass room near the front window where the suspended installation is hung. Beginning at 5 p.m., the projection accompanying the work will be activated. The installation is interactive, and visitors will be invited to gently touch the suspended elements while reflecting on themes of identity, belonging, and self-understanding.
KA KIPAPINTISOTC is composed of black ribbons of varying lengths and widths, from which hang metal cones known as “jingles.” Traditionally found on dresses, these handmade jingles are each embossed with a word written in Anishinaabe or French. Together, they reflect mowatt’s ongoing exploration and dissection of her identity as both Anishinaabe and Quebecois. Suspended from the ceiling, the work appears to float in space. Positioned in the window the work will be visible from within and outside the gallery.
Alongside the installation, a mediation space will be set up where visitors can handle jingles and further engage with the material language of the work. At 7 p.m., the gallery will close, and the projection will continue and remain visible from the sidewalk throughout the night. A QR code accessible from outside will link to daphne’s website, offering additional information about the artist and the work for passersby and late-night visitors alike.