This joint exhibition brings together the creative practices of Silas Wamsley and Vanessa Yanow, whose works interrogate embodiment as an unstable, relational, and politically situated condition. Through painting, sculpture, textiles, and assemblage, the exhibition examines how bodies (human and more-than-human) are constituted through processes of transformation, vulnerability, and care, resisting fixed ontological and symbolic frameworks. Together, Wamsley and Yanow articulate a shared refusal of fixed binaries: sacred and profane, body and spirit, autonomy and dependence.
Wamsley’s work engages with historical modes of figuration and iconography, drawing on early Renaissance visual languages while deliberately refusing their hierarchical and didactic legibility. His densely composed paintings depict figures in transitional states, where corporeal and extracorporeal modes of being coexist. Human, animal, vegetal, and symbolic elements interpenetrate, producing bodies that resist containment and categorization. Informed by monster theory, Wamsley’s figures articulate monstrosity as an emancipatory condition: one that destabilizes normative conceptions of the body and exposes the limits of what has historically been asked of “acceptable” forms of embodiment.
In dialogue, Yanow’s multidisciplinary practice constructs a tactile visual lexicon that foregrounds interconnection, shared vulnerability, and the ethics of care. Through the use of layered materials, found objects, and abstract structures, her work invites intimacy and touch, positioning materiality as a site of relational meaning. Drawing on research spanning queer and feminist theory, craft histories, ecology, and community care, Yanow reframes joy as a political and collective practice: one that resists individualism and affirms care as a mode of survival and relational flourishing.
Silas Wamsley is a painter based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia. His painting practice is inspired by early Renaissance figuration, surrealism and medieval bestiaries. He combines his human figures with plant life, animals (both living and dead), objects and fabric, to represent embodiment as inherently unstable, relational and fragile. Conceptually, his work is informed by monster theory and trans/crip studies of ecology. He is interested in the history of monstrosity in art and uses his figures to explore the limits of what the “normal” body has been asked to bear. He regards the monster as an emancipatory figure who resists containment and categorization, embodying cultural unease and existing at the edge of social acceptability.
Vanessa Yanow is a visual artist from Tiohià:ke / Montreal. She works across diverse media, including digital embroidery, textile collage, artifacts, flame-worked glass, photography, drawing, and assemblage. Yanow enriches her deeply imaginative and tactile artmaking practice with research whose diversity includes issues of female representation in the history of art and craft, queer sexualities and gender expressions, climate change, parasitology, and community care. Vanessa has produced several large bodies of work and has exhibited nationally and internationally. Her sculptures are part of the city of Montreal’s permanent collection, the Musée des Métiers d’art du Québec, and Le Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec.
