Chanel DesRoches: Quietly Screaming

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Chanel DesRoches, “Sinking,” 2025, oil, oil stick, pastel, graphite on canvas, 60" x 48" (image courtesy the artist and Peter Robertson Gallery)

In Quietly Screaming, Chanel DesRoches offers a body of work suspended between contradiction and conviction, where painterly boldness is not evidence of certainty, but a choreography of evasion, vulnerability, and persistence.

DesRoches builds her paintings through restless signals and layered mark-making, colliding oil paint, oil stick, graphite, and pastel into dense visual tangles. In large-scale works like Backfire and Suffocated Feelings, material accumulates to a point of smothering density. These surfaces act as defence mechanisms and emotional outbursts, simultaneously pushing the viewer back while pulling them into their chaos. DesRoches’ practice emerges from a tension between visibility and withdrawal. As a Queer woman negotiating the pressures of public space and personal history, she uses abstraction as a tool of deflection and camouflage. Her marks, scribbles, cuts, and smudges channel anxiety, sarcasm, and resistance. The paintings do not aim for resolution; they linger in unresolved states, loops, and edits. These works are not so much completed as they are lived with, revised, and revised again. This is her first solo exhibition at Peter Robertson Gallery. Chanel DesRoches is an artist working in painting, drawing, and printmaking based in Guelph, Ontario. She holds a Master of Fine Arts (2024) from York University and a Bachelor of Arts, Honours (2019) in studio art from the University of Guelph. This work was created with the support of the Visual Arts Creation Projects grant through the Ontario Arts Council and Government of Ontario.

Meet the Artist

Friday, July 11

6 - 8 pm

Opening Reception with the Artist

Saturday, July 12

2 - 4 pm

Exhibition on display July 10 - August 9