De Montigny Contemporary

05/28/2026

OPENING TONIGHT! Judy Nakagawa – Complicated Heart at Karsh-Masson Gallery

Reception from 5:30 to 7:30, City Hall, 110 Laurier Ave W, Ottawa, ON K1P 1J1

Judy Nakagawa’s (.sculptor) sculptures register at first encounter through their delicate fragility. Beneath this apparent lightness lies a lasting materiality that conveys quiet endurance. The tension between fragility and resilience resonates as an analogue for memory itself—ephemeral, yet persistent. Viewed through this lens, the works reflect Nakagawa’s Japanese Canadian family history, interpreted through her own emotional perspective and lived experiences.  

Nakagawa works with quiet focus, guided by a visceral intuition rather than logic and reason. Her practice is shaped by her Japanese Canadian heritage, nature and the rituals of daily life. Though she does not speak Japanese, her appreciation of traditional Japanese dance, modern dance and Butoh informs her sculptural sensitivity to movement and space. Nakagawa’s aesthetic resonates with Japanese sculpture and with artists such as Chiharu Shiota, whose use of simple materials creates forms that feel expansive yet light.
- Excerpt by Machiko Townson

 studied at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, D.C., where she received the coveted Berthold Schmutzhart Award for Sculpture. Since then, she has created both large- and small-scale works that have appeared in theatrical productions, institutional spaces, retail environments and private collections. Her work has been exhibited at notable venues, including the National Press Building in Washington, D.C.; the Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre in Burnaby, B.C.; the Britannia Shipyards National Historic Site in Richmond, B.C.; the Vancouver International Dance Festival; the City of Ottawa; and the Ottawa Art Gallery. She has exhibited in private galleries in Vancouver and Ottawa, and very recently showed a major work at Art Toronto with de Montigny Contemporary.

Last two 📸 by David Barbour

05/27/2026

We are thrilled to announce that the Nasjonalmuseet, Norway's National Museum, has acquired the sculpture Amorous Couple by Canadian-Iranian multidisciplinary artist Rah Eleh. This marks the first placement of Eleh's work in a European museum and the first acquisition of the artist's work by the Nasjonalmuseet.

Amorous Couple is a 3D-printed sculpture by Iranian-Canadian interdisciplinary artist Rah Eleh. Created in 2025, the eye-catching, life-size artwork reimagines a 17th-century Mughal illustration and is celebrated as a rare visual record of female same-sex desire in Islamic art history.

The two q***r figures are inspired by a 17th-century Mughal miniature, currently housed at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The sculpture on the left, identified as the king’s guard, is an androgynous figure who exhibits a mustache and an extended hairline. The figure on the right represents an aristocrat and one of the king’s many wives. Historical writings note that such guards would pleasure the wives with carrots and cucumbers in the secluded women’s quarters.

In the original depiction, the attire symbolizes status and the hierarchical relationship between them. In response, many revisions were made to mitigate these power dynamics. The work is the first in a series in which I unearth and recontextualize art-historical imagery of le****ns, bringing it into the contemporary moment for reconsideration and monumentalization.

Details: Rah Eleh, Amorous Couple, 3D Print, PLA, wood, 46 x 33 Inches, Approx. 5'2" each figure, 2025

Video: From the Nasjonalmuseet

05/14/2026

SAVE THE DATE! June 18 - 𝐆𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐊𝐢𝐧𝐠 - 𝐌𝐚𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐬

Gillian King is a visual artist, art therapist, registered psychotherapist (CRPO Qualifying), and art educator based on Treaty One Territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She holds an MFA from the University of Ottawa (2016) and a Master’s in Art Therapy from the Toronto Art Therapy Institute (2023). Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and featured in Border Crossings, Canadian Art, Create! Magazine, and CBC Gem. Gillian has received several awards, including the Espronceda Centre for the Arts and Culture Artistic Prize (Barcelona, 2019), the RBC Emerging Artist Award (2017), and the Nancy Petry Award (2017). Her exhibition history includes Galerie Karsh-Masson, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Ottawa Art Gallery, PDA Projects, General Hardware, Galerie St-Laurent+Hill, and Nicolas Robert.

Gillian King (), To Each Their Own, 2025, Acrylic, cold wax medium, synthetic and natural dyes on canvas, 60 × 96 inches (diptych)

05/12/2026

05/12/2026

Guy Maddin (.maddin) explains his new installation, A Memory Is Born, now up at DMC! Link to the digital catalogue in gallery bio!

“After forty years of filmmaking, I have come to think of my life only in visual terms, in pictures sketched, jumbled up in almost no order at all, then remembered poorly. My autobiography would NEVER be a series of sentences packed into chapters that fill out a memoir that might sit on a shelf of books. Rather, what I recall of my time on this planet is laid out before me in sequences of something like movie storyboards, those elemental blueprints of filmic preparation, the syntax of cinematic expression itself. So, I’ve come to revisit and reread my past by shuffling through these pictorial vocabulary units. As with all memories, these are clustered, disorganized narratives, sometimes intensely emotional, sometimes utterly inconsequential—always fragmented. Sometimes the memories of my parents have surely been collaged onto my own. Maybe a memory is born only when two or more sensations collide? As in a collage! And all non-impacts are swiftly forgotten? Please sift through my recollected collisions kindly, for they are gentle and true.”

05/08/2026

OPENING TONIGHT! HOFFOS / MADDIN

Guy Maddin (.maddin) and David Hoffos () both construct fragmented, image-based narratives that treat memory as unstable, collaged, and deeply subjective, drawing from cinematic language and visual illusion to blur the line between reality and recollection. Through analog processes and deliberate imperfections, their practices reveal how perception, nostalgia, and personal history are continuously reconstructed rather than fixed.

04/29/2026

As Eventide featuring Stanzie Tooth () & David Kaarsemaker () comes to a close in a few days, we are thrilled to share that two artworks in this exhibit were transformed into an amazing public artwork in Toronto, located within the Bentway Staging grounds.

Toronto-based artist Stanzie Tooth presents A Persistent Crossing, a public artwork that explores the relationship between humans and the urban environments they inhabit. 

In this final commission at Staging Grounds, Tooth creates a series of images that function as thresholds between the rigid world of Toronto’s industrial grid and the fluid resilience of its urban ecology. Extending her investigation of the figure-ground relationship from the scale of paper to public architecture, the work wraps three sides of the site’s scaffolding towers, inviting viewers to reconsider themselves not as the focal point of the urban landscape but as part of its intricate ecological fabric. 

Across the large-scale images, large human silhouettes appear as open spaces filled with native Ontario vegetation and shifting skies. These absent figures act as windows into an alternative landscape within the human body, suggesting a porous boundary between people and place where the figure and ground continually shift. Imagery of local pollinators—including the Luna moth, Cecropia moth, and Monarch butterfly—grounds the work in the ecologies of both the site and southern Ontario. Moving between bright daytime scenes and indigo night skies, Tooth stages the daily urban rhythms of the city underneath the Gardiner Expressway. 

Together, these images position the site itself as a threshold between the built and the natural worlds, encouraging viewers to recognize that nature is not something separate from urban life, but a living presence woven through it.

image: site rendering of A Persistent Crossing, 2026, The Bentway Staging Grounds

Waxing and Waning, Ink on watercolour paper. 30.25 x 45 Inches, 2026

Visitor, Ink on watercolour paper., 9 x 12 Inches, 2026

04/28/2026

We are thrilled to introduce the absolute legend, Guy Maddin (.maddin), to DMC. Maddin’s newest installation opens May 8th alongside David Hoffos ().

After forty years of filmmaking, Guy Maddin has come to think of his life only in visual terms, in pictures sketched, jumbled up in almost no order at all, then remembered poorly. His autobiography would 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 be a series of sentences packed into chapters that fill out a memoir that might sit on a shelf of books. Rather, what he recalls of his time on this planet is laid out before him in sequences of something like movie storyboards, those elemental blueprints of filmic preparation, the syntax of cinematic expression itself. So, he has come to revisit and reread his past by shuffling through these pictorial vocabulary units. As with all memories, these are clustered, disorganized narratives, sometimes intensely emotional, sometimes utterly inconsequential—always fragmented. Sometimes, the memories of his parents have surely been collaged onto his own. Maybe a memory is born only when two or more sensations collide? As in a collage! And all non-impacts are swiftly forgotten? One is asked to sift through his recollected collisions kindly, for they are gentle and true.Now open at Ottawa’s City Hall Art Gallery (@) Judy Nakagawa: Family, Memory and Art. April 16 to August 2, 2026 - Reception: May 28, 5:30 to 7:30

Guy Maddin has directed thirteen feature-length movies, most recently Rumours (2024), starring Cate Blanchett and Roy Dupuis; as well as The Forbidden Room (2015), My Winnipeg (2007), and The Saddest Music in the World (2003). He has also mounted over 70 performances of his films around the world, featuring live elements—orchestra, sound effects, singing, and narration—most recently The Green Fog (2016), which was accompanied live by the Kronos Quartet. His screenplay collaborators include Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro and poet John Ashbery. His movies Archangel (1990) & The Heart of the World (2000) both won America’s National Society of Film Critics awards for Best Experimental Film.

Guy Maddin, Maybe a memory is born 1-7, 8x10 inches, Collage on Paper, 2026

04/24/2026

Now open at Ottawa’s City Hall Art Gallery () Judy Nakagawa: Family, Memory and Art. April 16 to August 2, 2026 - Reception: May 28, 5:30 to 7:30

Judy Nakagawa’s (@) sculptures register at first encounter through their delicate fragility. Beneath this apparent lightness lies a lasting materiality that conveys quiet endurance. The tension between fragility and resilience resonates as an analogue for memory itself—ephemeral, yet persistent. Viewed through this lens, the works reflect Nakagawa’s Japanese Canadian family history, interpreted through her own emotional perspective and lived experiences.

Nakagawa began her professional career as a writer/editor for technical and institutional documents. She came to realize that her own reality was moving in a separate direction when a bout of double vision forced her to reconsider her line of work. A search for other options ultimately led her to a sculpture class at the nearby Corcoran School of the Arts and Design. She very quickly realized that, finally, she had found a language that would authentically express her own reality.

Today, Nakagawa works with quiet focus, guided by a visceral intuition rather than logic and reason. Her practice is shaped by her Japanese Canadian heritage, nature and the rituals of daily life. Though she does not speak Japanese, her appreciation of traditional Japanese dance, modern dance and Butoh informs her sculptural sensitivity to movement and space. Nakagawa’s aesthetic resonates with Japanese sculpture and with artists such as Chiharu Shiota, whose use of simple materials creates forms that feel expansive yet light.

- Text by Machiko Townson

Photo’s 1 and 2 by David Barbour

04/23/2026

Let’s take a moment to reintroduce the incredible Chris Glabb ()

Chris Glabb(b. 2000) is an emerging artist of mixed Métis and European descent working between Canada and the United States. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Ottawa in 2024. His work has been presented in exhibitions across Canada and the United States, including XL at AXENÉO7 in 2023 and At a Glance at the Ottawa Art Gallery in 2025.
He has presented solo exhibitions at the Shenkman Arts Centre in 2025 and the Niagara Artists Centre in 2026.

Glabb recently completed a residency at Residency Unlimited in New York City, which
culminated in a group exhibition in Brooklyn. In May 2026, he will participate in a residency at SAW Gallery’s Nordic Lab, where he works as a silkscreen technician and facilitates screen printing workshops with Indigenous youth.

Chris has been a recipient of the Arts Abroad Project Grant (2025) from the Canada Council for the Arts, an Exhibition Assistance Grant (2026) from the Ontario Arts Council, and an Equity and Inclusion in the Arts Seed Award (2025) from the City of Ottawa.

His work centres issues of hierarchy, intersectional Queerness, and Indigenous identity through referentiality, humour, and the appropriation of existing images. With a Post-Pop sensibility, his practice draws from visual culture to question social belonging, using references as points of entry and recognition.

Big Pansy I, Acrylic on panel, 12 x 12 inches, 2026

Spotted with Pansies VI, Acrylic and Flashe on panel, 16 x 20 inches, 2026

Spotted with Pansies VII, Acrylic and Flashe on panel. 16 x 20 inches, 2026

Spotted with Pansies VIII, Acrylic and Flashe on panel, 16 x 20 inches, 2026

04/19/2026

Sun Dogs is the latest series by David Kaarsemaker (). In this new body of paintings, Kaarsemaker turns to an optical phenomenon in which faintly coloured light flanks the sun when it rests low on the horizon. The experience of encountering this atmospheric event informs a body of work concerned with iridescence and perceptual instability. Developed through extended walks in remote landscapes, the paintings bring distant vistas into dialogue with close observation, collapsing proximity and expanse, enclosure and horizon. Built through successive layers of faintly pigmented primary glazes, with paint added and removed at each stage, the surfaces allow light to emanate from within the image itself. Referencing both stained glass and LCD screens, the resulting glow hovers between natural and synthetic registers, situating perception at a threshold where the atmospheric becomes structural.

David Kaarsemaker, This Rock 1, Oil on canvas, 27 x 36 Inches, 2026