Sharon Lockhart (b. 1964, Norwood, Massachusetts, US) creates installations, photography, film, painting and sculpture that explore landscapes and those that inhabit them, leading a practice that builds upon deep, long-term commitments to her collaborators and subjects.

**Sharon Lockhart** (b. 1964, Norwood, Massachusetts, US) creates installations, photography, film, painting and sculpture that explore landscapes and those that inhabit them, leading a practice that builds upon deep, long-term commitments to her collaborators and subjects. Layered histories and a multifaceted present become the origins for concise, rigorous compositions that delicately interrogate attention and focus. Often undertaking extended projects that yield cycles of interconnected works across media, Lockhart employs a research-intensive approach to immerse herself within communities, building trust and bonds in the process.

Sharon Lockhart has been the subject of solo exhibitions at international museums and institutions, including Walter Phillips Gallery,
Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff (2025); Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee (2022, 2019); Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao (2021); Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore (2021); Fondazione Fotografia Modena, Modena (2018); Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne (2015); Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2014); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2012); Secession, Vienna (2008); Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago (2001); and MAK – AustrianMuseum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art, Vienna (2000). Her work has been included in the Shanghai Biennale (2025, 2014), Biennale di Venezia (2017, Polish Pavilion), Liverpool Biennial (2014) and the Whitney Biennial, New York (1997, 2000, 2004). Her films have been presented in the New York Film Festival, Vienna International Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Berlin International Film Festival
and Sundance Film Festival. Lockhart lives and works in Los Angeles.

The Power Plant, in partnership with The Vega Foundation, is proud to present _Fogo_, an exhibition of work by the internationally acclaimed Los-Angeles-based artist Sharon Lockhart that was made over the course of four summers on Newfoundland’s Fogo Island. The exhibition consists of a series of photographs, collectively entitled _Fogo Island Portrait Studio_, that pictures the island’s young residents, alongside _WINDWARD_, a film installation featuring the same protagonists that brings to life the island’s striking geological formations, unique climate, and austere beauty. These works build on core themes that have continued to define Lockhart’s career: an exploration of place, a durational approach to attention, and a long-term commitment to those who appear before her lens.  

_WINDWARD_ is co-commissioned and co-produced by Shorefast/Fogo Island Arts, The Vega Foundation, and the National Gallery of Canada, with the support of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. 

The tour of this exhibition has been made possible through the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts. 


Sharon Lockhart: Fogo

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Sharon Lockhart.jpg

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ORGANIZED AND DEVELOPED BY

Julia Paoli, Director & Curator, The Vega Foundation
Kate Whiteway, Assistant Curator, The Vega Foundation

Developed in dialogue with the Curatorial team at The Power Plant.

CURATORS

Fogo

Zadie Xa has developed an expansive practice that addresses the nature of diasporic identities, global histories, familial legacies, and interspecies communication. Artist Benito Mayor Vallejo has worked in close collaboration with Xa exploring painting, installation, performance, and sculpture. 


**Zadie Xa** has developed an expansive practice that addresses the nature of diasporic identities, global histories, familial legacies, and interspecies communication. For her, art offers a means to analyse socio-political conditions and cultural behaviours through a lens of masquerade, play, costuming, and storytelling. Embracing a highly collaborative mode of working, she has developed ongoing exchanges with dancers and musicians and has worked with Benito Mayor Vallejo since 2006. 

Solo exhibitions of Xa’s work have been presented at Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Box, Plymouth; Leeds Art Gallery; Remai Modern, Saskatoon; Tramway, Glasgow; and Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Baku. Xa has also participated in the Jeju Biennale (2022), the 13th Shanghai Biennale, and the Sharjah Biennial 16, for which she was nominated for the Turner Prize 2025. Xa has a BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design, Vancouver, and an MFA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London. 

**Benito Mayor Vallejo** completed a BFA at the Université Polytechnique de Valencia and an MA from Chelsea College of Arts, London. He has participated in exchange programmes at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze and Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design, Vancouver. Since 2006, alongside his own practice, he has worked in close collaboration with Zadie Xa exploring painting, installation, performance, and sculpture. 

In October 2026, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery will present the first major solo exhibition in Ontario of Vancouver-born, UK-based artist Zadie Xa, made in collaboration with long-term collaborator, artist Benito Mayor Vallejo. 

An immersive installation that responds to the specific context of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, the exhibition will combine new and existing works, including paintings by Xa, murals, sound, and a mobile sculpture made of over 600 brass bells, suspended from the gallery’s ceiling in the shape of a conch shell, co-created by Xa together with Mayor Vallejo. Visitors will experience a vibrant, multi-sensory environment that connects Xa’s ongoing exploration of storytelling, Korean mythology, folklore, diasporic identity, and marine ecology to the shores of Lake Ontario.  

_Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything_ is organized and developed in partnership with Esker Foundation, Calgary, where it is on view from May 23 to August 23, 2026, and PHI, Montréal, where it will be on view from April 29 to September 12, 2027.

We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts for its support of the tour of this exhibition. 

Zadie Xa with Benito Mayor Vallejo: Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything

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Zadie Xa.png

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EXHIBITION PARTNERS

Frances Loeffler, Curator of Exhibitions
Sarah Edo, TD Curatorial Fellow, 2025–27

Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything

Haig Aivazian grapples with the metamorphic nature of three technologies: artificial light, computation, and law.

**Haig Aivazian** grapples with the metamorphic nature of three technologies: artificial light, computation, and law. He examines the ways in which the administration of light and darkness makes and unmakes persons and transforms the material conditions of architecture and geography—how they are inhabited and moved through by humans, animals, objects, machines, and other strange creatures. Aivazian was Artistic Director of Beirut Art Center (BAC) from 2020 to 2022, where he founded and edited _The Derivative_, a bi-annual cultural journal.

Stephanie Comilang is an artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. Her documentary-based works create narratives that look at how mobility, capital, and labour are shaped on a global scale through various cultural and social factors.

**Stephanie Comilang** is an artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. Her documentary-based works create narratives that look at how mobility, capital, and labour are shaped on a global scale through various cultural and social factors. Her solo exhibition _Search for Life_, curated by Chus Martínez, opened at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid in March 2024. The second part of the exhibition, curated by Amal Khalaf, was presented at the Sharjah Biennial 16, United Arab Emirates in 2025. Her work was included in the Hawai‘i Triennial, curated by Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Binna Choi, and Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu, in 2025.

Comilang’s collaborative exhibition with Simon Speiser, _Piña, Why is the Sky Blue?_, has been shown at the Mackenzie Gallery, Regina; Gallery TPW, Toronto; Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin; Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff; Tate Modern, London; University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane; and Silverlens, Manila. She has had solo exhibitions at Gallery 44, Toronto; ChertLüdde, Berlin; The Institute for Endotic Research, Berlin; and MOCA Toronto. Her work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; The Contemporary Art Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany, Berlin; Musée d’art de Contemporain, Montreal; Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin, among others. Comilang was the recipient of the 2019 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most prestigious art prize.

Alia Farid lives and works in Kuwait and Puerto Rico. Through mostly sculpture and film, her work explores the ways in which modernity reconfigures collectivity and ritual.

**Alia Farid** lives and works in Kuwait and Puerto Rico. Through mostly sculpture and film, her work explores the ways in which modernity reconfigures collectivity and ritual. She has a BFA from la Escuela de Artes Plásticas, San Juan, a MS in Visual Studies from the Visual Arts Program in MIT, Cambridge, and a MA in Museum Studies and Critical Theory from the Programa d’Estudis Independents MACBA, Barcelona. In 2023, she received the Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award and in 2023–24, she was the David and Roberta Logie Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Farid has had solo exhibitions in Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Basel; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main; and Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain, Brest. Recent and upcoming group shows include participation in the Geneva Biennale Sculpture Garden, Whitney Biennial, Diriyah Biennale, Bienal de São Paulo, Gwangju Biennale, Sharjah Biennial, _Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011_ at MoMA PS1, Yokohama Triennale, and Asia Pacific Triennial. She has forthcoming solo exhibitions at Contemporary Art Museum Houston in partnership with Rivers Institute, Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York.

Hope Pearl Strickland is an artist-filmmaker from Manchester, UK, working with experimental and documentary-based modes, incorporating archival, 16mm, and digital practices.

**Hope Pearl Strickland** is an artist-filmmaker from Manchester, UK, working with experimental and documentary-based modes, incorporating archival, 16mm, and digital practices. A particular focus is given to re-entangling the supposedly disparate landscapes of Jamaica and the north of England, through an attention to labour migration, diasporic longing, and resource extraction.

Strickland’s work has screened internationally at film festivals including the 59th New York Film Festival (2021); BFI London Film Festival (2022); International Film Festival Rotterdam (2025); and Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (New Cinema Awards, 2025). Presentations in exhibition spaces include _Looking Back (Being and Memory)_ at Arnolfini, Bristol; _Bugs & Metamorphosis: Glitching Photography_ by the Hasselblad Center at Gothenburg Art Museum; and the _Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes_ at Serpentine Galleries, London. Strickland was awarded the Aesthetica Art Prize Emerging Prize in 2023 and shortlisted for the Jarman Award in 2025. They are an Associate Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London.

Yuyan Wang is a filmmaker and video artist currently based in Paris

**Yuyan Wang** is a filmmaker and video artist currently based in Paris. Her works involve recycled materials from the industrial sphere of image production, tracing their mutation and proliferation within digital frameworks and representations. Through the editing process, Wang deconstructs and recontextualizes the intricate hierarchies and inherent meanings in materials—whether found, processed, or produced—stripping symbols of their conventional paths of perception and turning them into immersive, sensory experiences.

Wang’s work has been showcased at the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, UCCA Beijing, the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, the 15th Gwangju Biennale, and various festivals, such as the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale), the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), MoMA Doc Fortnight, CPH:DOX, and the European Media Art Festival (EMAF), receiving numerous awards. Recent solo exhibitions include The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; Wanås Konst, Sweden; 3 bis f – Centre d’arts contemporains, Aix-en-Provence; and CRAC Alsace, Centre rhénan d’art contemporain, Altkirtch.

The Power Plant and The Vega Foundation present _Owner of a Lonely Heart_, a program of recent moving image works by contemporary artists Haig Aivazian, Stephanie Comilang, Alia Farid, Hope Pearl Strickland, and Yuyan Wang. On view in The Power Plant’s North Gallery, the 80-minute program cycles on a loop, moving from documentary, narrative, and archival approaches to filmmaking toward increasingly associative, musical, and rhythmic forms.

The artists’ works trace the movement of raw materials drawn from the earth, transformed into products, and transported by waterways–be they petroleum, pearls, or plastic plants. Each work portrays a dense web of relations linking labour, ecosystems, and global economies. By tracing the transformation of raw matter, the works reveal how people are bound by circumscribed geographies and unevenly shaped by global networks of extraction and circulation. Together, the artists consider how geopolitical histories shape social and collective identity, and how individuals locate themselves within an overwhelming present. When the prosperity and stability experienced in one place is enabled by the exploitation and scarcity imposed elsewhere, what responsibility does vision bring?

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Yuyan Wang.jpg

Owner of a Lonely Heart

Sami Tsang is a Chinese-Canadian artist working primarily as a ceramicist. Her sculptures stem from her own narratives as well as the stories she gathers around domestic encounters. Using clay, resin, rice paper and ball point pen, Tsang channels these stories into her art-making to reveal shared, raw, emotional experiences.

Sami Tsang is a Chinese-Canadian artist working primarily as a ceramicist. Her sculptures stem from her own narratives as well as the stories she gathers around domestic encounters. Using clay, resin, rice paper and ball point pen, Tsang channels these stories into her art-making to reveal shared, raw, emotional experiences. Tsang earned a Master of Fine Art degree in Ceramic Art at Alfred University (NY) in 2021 and is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Harbourfront Centre.

Marking the inaugural Smokestack Commission Program, _What We Carry Forward_ by mixed-media artist Sami Tsang is a site-specific large-scale ink mural inspired by childhood shadow puppetry and populated by tiny porcelain figurines of girls. Through this imagined world of play, protection and collective movement, Tsang considers the quieter inheritances passed between generations, and what each chooses to preserve, transform or leave behind.

Smokestack Commission Program: Sami Tsang

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Sami Tsang_What We Carry Forward.jpg

Adelina Vlas, Artistic Director
Sarah Edo, TD Curatorial Fellow

Smokestack Commission Program

Ella Gonzales is a Filipina-Canadian artist working between painting and Computer-Aided Design programs, as led by her interest in space making. Her painting on piña silk, a fabric made from the leaves of a pineapple plant that is native to the Philippines, is inspired by the concept of displacement that immigrant communities experience. 

Ella Gonzales is a Filipina-Canadian artist working between painting and Computer-Aided Design programs, as led by her interest in space making. She has recently shown work with Unit 17, Vancouver; Christie Contemporary, Toronto; Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge; AXENÉO7, Gatineau; Hunt Gallery, Toronto; Galerie Nicolas Robert, Toronto; the plumb, Toronto and Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, Kingston. Gonzales holds a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art from the University of Guelph.

The Power Plant continues its longstanding Fleck Clerestory Commission Program with Ella Gonzales’s _A Room’s Proportion, above or below_. The work transforms the gallery with layers of painted, translucent fabric based on the proportions of domestic interiors recalled by the artist from memory. As one remembered space is superimposed onto another, visitors move through overlapping rooms, histories and perspectives.  

Evoking the notion of the threshold, Gonzales considers what happens when one condition slips into another, and how traces of what came before remain visible in what follows.

Fleck Clerestory Commission Program: Ella Gonzales

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Ella Gonzales_A Room's Proportion, above or below.png

Fleck Clerestory Commission Program

Morgan Sears-Williams is an interdisciplinary artist and cultivator. Through her art practice, she reflects on queer feminist histories both known and unknown, while speaking to larger structures of power and oppression.

**Morgan Sears-Williams** is an interdisciplinary artist and cultivator. Through her art practice, she reflects on queer feminist histories both known and unknown, while speaking to larger structures of power and oppression. Bridging methods of alternative processes, experimental film and queer histories (both personal and political), she troubles traditional approaches to analog film in order to address contemporary concerns in image making. She has exhibited her works across Turtle Island and internationally at Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Arsenal Contemporary, Artifact Film Festival, Contemporary Calgary, Gallery 44, the 8fest and more. In support of her artwork and research, Morgan received the graduate scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in 2023, and has received grants from the BC Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts.


The image in _feeling along the edges_, consists of several 16mm film strips collated into one frame, capturing Hanlan’s Point Beach, a site of queer community and refuge. Witnessing the gradual geological erosion that is currently occurring there, Sears-Williams filmed the beach, then developed the film in instant coffee and buried it in the sand for five days. The resulting work mirrors the ecological disintegration of Hanlan’s Point with the disappearance of longstanding public spaces for queer communities. 

South Facade Billboard: Morgan Sears-Williams

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Morgan Sears-Williams.jpg

South Facade Billboard

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