"If you know I know" and "Sliver"

Family reopens with a pair of group shows in a recently completed commercial condo unit in Montréal, building on previous projects using spaces for sale or for rent, leaning into precariousness. If you know I know, curated by Jonathan Schouela, includes five artists working with multi-layered mediums. Sliver, curated by Maya Stewart Pathak, presents complex and monochrome versions of fantasy in singular materials, with attention to negative space. In If you know I know, given materials or ready-mades from leftover construction materials to screenshots become digested and elevated in an equally diverse set of processes. Caroline Douville transfers screenshots from Wikipedia articles highlighting wealth discrepancies in Haiti, native to the artist’s family, onto canvas. Her work reframes information, enlarging, distorting or reproducing images with airbrushed paint, addressing their excess. Nick Howe uses a shelving unit left in the space to display handmade plaster tiles, each made unique with erratic pastel markings. Flowers drying throughout the exhibition in Edwin Isford’s silk sheaths contrast with Maya Stewart Pathak’s reiki video Feral Girl which projects on a loop onto a silk screen rigged with silver fastenings. With Bunyip and Ghoul Drool, James O. Clark incorporates subtle elements of light into scrap metal assemblages, intuitively drawing over them with phosphorescent pigment. These tulip-like sculptures stand on the crates in which they were sent, using magnets to stabilize them, echoing the mix of multipurpose industrial materials with freeform elements throughout the space. In Sliver, Connor Bokovay’s light blue pencil drawings depict characters that morph into aspects of one another, like avatars, looking for fulfillment. Through leaving a history of marks, as well as their use of white space, they intimately illuminate moments of incompletion. Dante Guthrie casts miniature model game parts into bronze sigils, duplicating and mirroring sections, manipulating seriality into symmetrical forms. Michaela Snoyer’s chainmail tapestries turn identically replicated constituent parts into flexible mimetic patterns. These three artists work through malleability, sharing a likeness to silver— its transformative and reflective quality.