With Meenakashi Ghadial + Caryn Wei Ya Xie
April 17, 2024, 5–6pm
Free + in-person program
Open to all
The final lines of Ada Limón’s poem The Hurting Kind read: “I see the tree above the grave and think, I’m wearing my heart on my leaves. My heart on my leaves. Love ends. But what if it doesn’t?” This is the title of Meenakashi Ghadial and Caryn Wei Ya Xie’s exhibition, where they hold their hearts in their hands. They welcome us into personal moments that embody their humanness—experiences of love, loss and denial, and celebration. This tour will be a space for them to explain their artistic practices within the exhibition, the experiences that informed it, and the technical processes, as well as the emotional journeys, of their paintings. Following, there will be an opportunity to ask the artist questions about their practices.
Visit “Love ends. But what if it doesn’t?”, in the Main Space from March 5 – May 11, 2024.
Meenakashi Ghadial (b. 2001) is a visual artist from Brampton, Ontario currently based in Katarokwi/Kingston. She creates representational oil paintings on non-traditional substrates that explore themes of marriage, love, intimacy, grief and sexuality. She presents the car as a multifaceted liminal space that functions as a safe space for her as a queer Punjabi-Canadian woman. Her inspiration draws from personal experience navigating her queer identity as a second-generation immigrant in her family. Through the use of current documentation as well as archival family material, Meenakashi creates narratives that explore the particularities of intergenerational experiences. Ghadial received a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) with a Minor in Art History and is currently working towards her Bachelor of Education at Queen’s University. She is an active member of the Ontario Kingston Women Artists Association, and will be completing her second artist residency in Kingston at the Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning in April where she plans to explore themes of memory, movement, and queerness through more interdisciplinary approaches.
Caryn Wei Ya Xie (b. 2002) is a realism artist from Whitby, Ontario currently based in Katarokwi/Kingston, where she is pursuing her Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) with a minor in History and a Bachelor of Education at Queen’s University. As a Cantonese Chinese-Canadian painter, Xie’s work satirizes techno-Orientalist rhetoric by appropriating digital aesthetics to reimagine archival family photographs. These digital interventions translate a personal history of immigration into a broader conversation on the diasporic experience of fragmented identity and memory. In doing so, her paintings bring to attention the contrast between the analogue and the digital, the ‘East’ and the ‘West,’ and the past and present. She has exhibited locally at the Window Art Gallery, as well as at the Bevy gallery space in Toronto. The Chinese Neo-Realists, as well as her current professional work as a graphic designer, largely inform her personal visual language and her thematic emphasis on Asian agency and Asian narratives.
© 2024 Union Gallery | All Rights Reserved