June 15 – July 19, 2024
Serena Walk and Shellie Zhang
In their joint exhibition, Walk and Zhang curate an array of work spanning their artistic practices, infused with intricate patterns, an obsession with objects, and layered historical and personal narratives. In Porous Terrain, narratives, symbols, and totems permeate surfaces and crevices—like water against earth, shaping and reshaping form and understanding.
Curated by Adrien Crossman, this exhibition is the second in a series of three that pair an established artist with an emerging Hamilton based artist in which artistic affinities are shared. The artists work together in collaboration toward the installation of a month long two person exhibition at Orchid Contemporary.
Documentation by Eli Nolet
Serena Walk (she/her) is an emerging artist based in Canada. Her multidisciplinary practice delves into the intricate ways orientalism, colonialism, and western media have influenced the lived experiences and cultural narratives of the Asian diaspora in Canada. Central to her work are themes of identity, inter-generational relationships, and Asian futurism. Her practice blends storytelling with both traditional and emergent media ranging from textiles to extended-reality.
Shellie Zhang (b. 1991, Beijing, China) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. By uniting both past and present iconography with the techniques of mass communication, language and sign, Zhang explores the contexts and construction of a multicultural society by disassembling approaches to tradition, gender, history, migration and popular culture. She creates images, objects and projects in a wide range of media to explore how integration, diversity and assimilation is implemented and negotiated, and how manifestations of these ideas relate to lived experiences. Zhang is interested in oral and local history, how culture is learned and sustained, and how the objects and iconographies of culture are remembered and preserved.
Shellie Zhang (b. 1991, Beijing, China) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. By uniting both past and present iconography with the techniques of mass communication, language and sign, Zhang explores the contexts and construction of a multicultural society by disassembling approaches to tradition, gender, history, migration and popular culture. She creates images, objects and projects in a wide range of media to explore how integration, diversity and assimilation is implemented and negotiated, and how manifestations of these ideas relate to lived experiences. Zhang is interested in oral and local history, how culture is learned and sustained, and how the objects and iconographies of culture are remembered and preserved.