Soft Focus
Sonya Derviz, Merveille Kelekele Kelekele, Rachel Lancaster, Lyne Lapointe, Sam Lipp,
Nour Malas, Karice Mitchell, Athena Papadopoulos, Sequoia Scavullo, Adelisa Selimbašić,
Shahin Sharafaldin
and Manuel Axel Strain
Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal
11th July – 7th September, 2024
Many artworks carry with them a sense of longing, captured through brief or hazy moments. Sonya Derviz creates moody, monochrome portraits in charcoal and oil on linen. The soft contours of her reposed figures bleed into the background, while dark, drowsy eyes stare eerily out at the viewer. Pulling from archival editorial images, Karice Mitchell’s prints show glamorous snippets of skin, which with their pixelated contours build a sense of pleasure, sex, and control through concealment and intrigue. Sam Lipp uses various tools to layer oil paint on steel, creating a soft, veiled effect. The screws poking through the metal canvases combined with seductive advert-like content—here, a bare shoulder and a glossy anti-anxiety medication label—recall commercial signage, with a tinge of intimacy. Rachel Lancaster’s realistic paintings emanate a gentle glow, showing glimpses of the mundane—a collarbone, a sweater hair tucked behind an ear—like remembering a specific but fleeting detail of a person from memory.
Several artists use portraiture as a tool for personal introspection and storytelling. Adelisa Selimbašić explores views of the body through everyday scenes, often portraying ambiguous features for consumption. Her work evokes the narrative of a continuous scroll of parts rather than wholes. Manuel Axel Strain prioritizes Indigenous epistemologies through the embodied knowledge of their mother, father, siblings, cousins, aunties, uncles, nieces, nephews, grandparents and ancestors in their work. In one canvas, eyes float apart from their sitter, with fish leathers hung beneath the frame, while another depicts a classical but defiant red nude, their face shrouded by an embellished rock inspired by pictographs. Shahin Sharafaldin’s paintings feature meticulously layered brushwork in vivid tones, showing mystical people and spaces as stand-ins for love, death, and yearning. In his haunting scenes of empty interiors, for example, there is a sense of presence through absence.
In other works, the distinctions between dream and nightmare, human and supernatural, are unclear. Nour Malas’ paintings harness thick, almost bloody brushstrokes, in which swathes of bold colour and shadow seem to emulate the cavernous depths of the underworld. Superimposed textures and shapes comprise Sequoia Scavullo’s abstract paintings, and sometimes, recognizable motifs or bodies peek through, like familiar elements revealing themselves during a vivid dream.
Merveille Kelekele Kelekele’s large-scale paintings are fantastical and psychologically charged, embodied in multi-face beasts with claws, horns, and gangly limbs, mighty and mad against their acidic backdrops. Using wood, ink on paper, and other materials, Lyne Lapointe fashions magical solitary figures with collage techniques. Athena Papadopoulos’ personified mixed media sculptures are worlds unto themselves; stuffed textiles, synthetic toys, and everyday goods are assembled into tentacled creatures who seem to swallow everything before them, a rich portrait of a life told through things.
In photography, soft focus originated from a technical flaw—a lens imperfection that hindered the photographer from capturing a clear picture of their subject. Here, this lack of clarity (or inability to capture) serves as the impetus for the selection of work in this exhibition. Whether it be through evoking an actual sense of movement, absence, nostalgia, empowerment or concealment, these artworks evoke the elusive qualities that hover just beyond the frame.
Photography by Paul Litherland