Re(Moved)

FEBRUARY 2, 2022 - FEBRUARY 12, 2022

The Red Head Gallery is pleased to present, Re(Moved), a rental exhibition by Dorota Dziong.

Re (Moved), an exhibition of paintings on cardboard and on canvas, is informed by my experiences with displacement through Toronto’s housing crisis and in my family’s past. It also reflects my ongoing interest in seriality as a creative method and speaks to broader themes of shelter and impermanence. 

Containers and compartments emerged as a persistent theme. These physical and metaphorical objects signify boundaries, bonds, and holders of memories and fantasies. In this particular series, they also reference home, shelter, and a space for the body. While using these images, I teeter between “story” and “history” to insinuate narratives, both factual and fictional. 

I experienced Toronto’s ongoing disappearance of artist spaces and extreme housing precarity of renters first hand after being forced, along with all tenants, to leave my longtime home and studio spaces. During that time I was also engaging with images from my family history in Poland that includes stories of movement during WWII, expropriation of land and property during post-war communist regime and, more recently, displacement through emigration and economic instability. Spaces and our right to exist within them became top concerns.

In the works on cardboard, subjects are painted on canvas and then cut out and re-contextualized onto more ephemeral and utilitarian corrugated box cardboard. In shifting to more disposable supports, I point to the tension and discomfort I feel while continuing to make objects in a world with too many objects and acknowledge the fatigue I have experienced while repeatedly moving and storing things during recent residential and studio moves. These new, collaged works on cardboard speak to precarity and non-permanence.

BIOGRAPHY

Dorota Dziong is based in Toronto where she maintains her studio practice. She arrived in Canada from Poland at a young age as part of an economic and political migration, and studied at University of Toronto. Her exhibition history includes group and solo shows. Recent exhibitions include group shows At Intervals (Auto BLDG) and New Measures (Collision Gallery) in Toronto, which presented the work of participants of the Akin MOCA 2019-2020 Residency (currently Akin Studio Program in the Auto BLDG). Dziong has participated in the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair in recent years. Currently she is part of John B. Aird Gallery's Still Life exhibition. Additionally, Dziong has worked at arts organizations, including Crow’s Theatre during and after their capital campaign to build and open Streetcar Crowsnest. She is an active member of the tenant association fighting for the rights of our group of expelled tenants.