Azadeh Elmizadeh and Ella Gonzales: Soft Smoke

The Gallery is offering free admission on Friday, Aug. 5 as part of Downtown Lethbridge’s First Fridays. Check out current exhibitions by Peter von Tiesenhausen, Azadeh Elmizadeh and Ella Gonzales, and Kellen Spencer, see what’s on offer at the Shop at SAAG with feature artist Darby Havrelock (see more on Darby below) and take in great deals at your favourite downtown restaurants and shops. We’re open from noon to 8 p.m. 

Soft Smoke developed out of conversations between Azadeh Elmizadeh and Ella Gonzales’ shared empathy for cross-cultural migration. They bonded over a common desire to contextualize their paintings through a lens not solely informed by a Eurocentric view of art history. They share a common investigation into the psychic space of belonging that resides in cultural traditions, dreams, and architectural residues of lived experience.

In his 1958 book on architecture, The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard describes an experiment where children were asked to draw their own homes:

If [the child] is happy, he will succeed in drawing a snug, protected house which is well built on deeply-rooted foundations… it is warm indoors, and there is a fire burning, such a big fire, in fact, that it can be seen coming out of the chimney. When the house is happy, soft smoke rises in gay rings above the roof.[1]

The experiment demonstrates how emotional and psychological states within the home can alter visual perceptions of it. For Bachelard, the house is a psychic state. Emotional perceptions of lived space align with both artist’s interest in how intangible elements of interior space, both imaginative and real, such as: light, colour, decoration, and social space, colour the psyche. For Elmizadeh, the interiority of the imaginative space becomes a refuge to reimagine and rebuild the meaning of home as a psychic state.

Elmizadeh and Gonzales open their practices up to the references, memories, and impressions of architecture that linger on the surface of their works. For Elmizadeh, each painting is a fleeting transition. By layering translucent glazes of paint and burnishing the surface, her paintings gesture towards temporal processes of becoming. The burnishing process produces a hazy appearance, not unlike Bachelard’s description of contented smoke. Based upon Persian miniature paintings, Elmizadeh’s images are like verbs that transition between interior and exterior space, architecture and figure, and material and illusory depth.

For Gonzales, family homes occupied in the course of migration are recreated and merged in 3D modelling programs, creating hybridized spaces forming the basis of her paintings. These paintings are supported on Filipino jusi and piña silk from banana and pineapple leaf fibres. Traditionally, both silks are used in formal clothing and domestic linens. Gesturing to domestic interiors and as an intervention into the former library space, Gonzales presents her paintings like books or linens within bookshelves. With each new exhibition, these works have the potential to be rearranged, reimagined, and re-inhabited, like the process of continually moving and making a new home.

Gonzales’s large curtain-sized painting is hung in a dialogue with Elmizadeh’s largest painting to give the impression of an opening or a portal created by fire and leading to the uncertainty of unimagined realms.

Curated by Adam Whitford, Interim Curator

[1] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 72.

Azadeh Elmizadeh is a visual artist based in Toronto who works between painting and collage. She holds an MFA from the University of Guelph (2020) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from OCAD (2016) and Tehran University (2010). Elmizadeh has exhibited at Birch Contemporary (Toronto, ON) and Boarding House Gallery (Guelph, ON) Franz Kaka Gallery (Toronto, ON) Kamloops Art Gallery (Kamloops, BC). Elmizadeh’s work examines how contingency, uncertainty, and translation can be strategies used to undermine prescribed cultural boundaries.

Ella Gonzales is a Filipina-Canadian artist who works between painting and Computer-Aided Design programs, as led by her interest in space making. Her paintings and installations are inspired by narratives of migration that inform the Filipino Diaspora. She has shown work with Galerie Nicolas Robert (Toronto), the plumb (Toronto), Patel Brown (Toronto), Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre (Kingston), and Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto). Gonzales holds a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Studio Art from the University of Guelph and was the recent recipient of the 2021 Nancy Petry Award in painting.

Azadeh and Ella have worked closely as colleagues and friends while completing their Master of Fine Arts at the University of Guelph. Soft Smoke  has been developed based on many conversations and shared sentiments about cross-cultural migration.

This exhibition was made possible with funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and the City of Lethbridge.