Fall and Spin

July 17 to August 30, 2025
Vernissage: Thursday, July 17, 5 to 8 pm

Amélie Bigard
Zoe Ann Cardinal Cire
Azza El Siddique
Sharona Franklin
Ben Gould
Frantz Patrick Henry
Christopher Paul Jordan
Yarema Malashchuk & Roman Khimei
Audie Murray
Veronika Pausova
Preston Pavlis
Kira Scerbin

Bradley Ertaskiran is thrilled to present Fall and Spin, which brings together international artists whose practices explore the tensions between tenderness and control, exposure and containment. The works carry a shared sense of the body—its weight, its thresholds, its limits—as both subject and site of vulnerability. This grouping suggests the means by which we protect and console ourselves, however literally or artificially, from harm.

Several works address the body’s many sensitivities, its care and neglect. Sharona Franklin’s installation Wish You Well (2022) oscillates between sustenance and contamination; organic and biomedical materials—fungi, bones, and hazardous waste—are encased in dried, jewel-like gelatin, as a critical exploration of toxicity and chronic illness. So too, Ben Gould’s sculptures reckon with an unstable body: sharp instruments meet delicate organisms, veins and roots budding from metal tools, materializing both the rigidity and fluidity of the body’s physical capabilities.

Frantz Patrick Henry often harnesses common building materials into his work—metal, glass, stone—which when diverted from their utilitarian function gain a sort of pulse. His scenes are made of layered, intricate aluminum cut-outs that are sharp but delicate. Azza El Siddique’s Final Fantasy (2023) is in perpetual transformation; over time, the slow drip of water from an overhead irrigation system erodes the metal scaffolding and tarnishes bisque-fired porcelain vessels beneath. The installation’s central column is framed by four monitors in which spells from ancient Egyptian and Nubian funerary texts including The Book of Two Ways, a guide to the afterlife, are presented in an uninterrupted digital scroll.

In several instances, the body is illustrated through deliberate absence. Made of bear grease and smudge remnants, Audie Murray’s drawings are the result of careful, repeated gestures. These traces appear withdrawn, even withholding, as a means of pushing back against a presumed reading of Indigeneity often demanded by the settler gaze. Christopher Paul Jordan’s collaged paintings and textiles also prioritize accumulated traces, often initiated with the scraps and remains of a former artwork. Lacing salvaged window screens and netting with paint is a purposefully futile process, requiring layers of activity in spite of the surface pushing back. Zoe Ann Cardinal Cire’s paintings and mixed-media sculptures play with legibility, playfully concealing, distorting, or magnifying the human body; in in Pr(ax)is (2023), cascading beads hung from a wooden frame show the artist’s mother picking wildflowers with an axe, revealed incrementally.

Other works convey the transitory experiences of youth. Amélie Bigard paints disquieted, colourful scenes of the collective joys and neuroses of teenagers, who seem caught between lingering gloom and a refusal to grow up. Ukrainian artist-duo Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei reveal an intimate portrait of Kyiv youth in Dedicated to the Youth of the World II (2019), focusing on a former Soviet film production studio turned rave. Dedicated to the Youth of the World III (2023) reenacts the event nearly frame for frame, with the new reality of constant threat from the full-scale invasion by Russian occupation forces. Shown side-by-side, yet years apart, the films reveal both the exaltation and alienation of youth, their escape from and rejection of everyday life.

A surreal and sometimes violent undercurrent runs through the exhibition’s paintings. Kira Scerbin’s humanoid figures are suspended in eerie animation, alive despite their unimposing stature, relaying a palpable tension across her paintings’ surfaces. In Preston Pavlis’s two-sided artworks, safety pins and hand-sewn stitches pierce the surface of the canvas, and so too the skin of his painted figures, while raw embroidered quilts support the backside of the paintings, made of familiar, comforting fabrics. Veronika Pausova’s paintings show slippery body fragments—floating breasts, detached digits, and threaded nipples—poised atop a textured underpainting, the result of pressing cloth directly onto an oil and turpentine-covered canvas, then peeling it away. There is a visceral and anxious impulse to grasp, pick, or soothe our own bodies as if to assure ourselves that we too are whole.

^{Artworks by Amélie Bigard courtesy of Galerie PACT; Artworks by Audie Murray courtesy of Fazakas Gallery; Artwork by Kira Scerbin courtesy of King’s Leap.}