In his new exhibition at Blouin Division in Toronto, Simon Hughes is expanding on a painting practice he began in 2016. In this work, compositions that can loosely be interpreted as landscapes are created through the integration of collage elements and simple shapes painted in overlapping glazes of acrylic colour. These collage elements are culled from sources that range wildly, from National Geographic magazines to 1970s fantasy-art calendars, resulting in a hybrid form of classic Surrealism. Four large paintings form the nucleus of the show, featuring the results of an extended period of experimentation with colours and palettes. The challenge to create works in “difficult” ranges (i.e. pink, beige) pushes the idea of “dreamscapes” into newly resonant terrain.

Amanda Boulos is a Mississauga-born Palestinian artist and educator based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Engaging with personal and national oral narratives from Palestine, Lebanon, and Canada, Boulos explores how the Palestinian Diaspora is constantly undergoing what philosopher Catherine Malabou calls “unprecedented metamorphosis,” a metamorphosis that is capable of abandoning a burdened body or identity to allow a new form to emerge. Throughout her painting practice, Boulos abstracts and transforms oral narratives by fragmenting their environments, allegorizing their fates, and re-envisioning them into symbolic representations. Her paintings are an investigation into and reflection on the plasticity of her, her family’s, and her people’s perceptions, histories, and lives.

In Will o’ Wisp, Boulos also presents a series of ‘smash paintings’ on paper. These smash paintings replicate the intention of a Rorschach test, where the symmetrical image prompts an invitation for interpretation. Boulos takes images she’s familiar with and ‘smashes’ them, skewing the original subject, and doubling it, to reveal a new transformed image and with it fresh, even lucid visual interpretations.

Boulos completed her BFA at York University and MFA at the University of Guelph. She has shown at Richard Rhodes Dupont Projects (Toronto, ON), Arsenal Contemporary Art (New York, NY), Galerie Nicolas Robert (Montréal, QC), and Anna Leonowens Gallery (Halifax, NS). Boulos is the winner of the 20th RBC Canadian Painting Competition and was NSCAD University’s 2022 Isabel Pope Artist in Residence (Halifax, NS). She is an instructor at the University of Toronto and UTM and Sheridan’s joint program in Art and Art History, a member of the Toronto project space the plumb and a programmer for the Toronto Palestine Film Festival.