The Power Plant’s new season offers contemplative and immersive exhibitions that reflect on our complex relationships with gardens
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery is delighted to announce our upcoming exhibition season with two solo presentations by Toronto-based artists Emmanuel Osahor and Shelagh Keeley. Through immersive installations that use either traditional mediums or moving images, both artists consider the complex histories and uses of gardens as built environments. Through his layered paintings, Osahor invites visitors to contemplate beauty in the seclusion of a night garden, while Keeley’s film notebooks trace the artist’s journey and her continued efforts to bring forward the intricacies and contradictions of the world we live in. The exhibitions will run from April 11 to September 14, 2025. Admission is free.
“With this upcoming season, spanning from spring to fall, we are thrilled to present two exhibitions that carry us into other worlds, both imaginary and real, where we can contemplate beauty and reflect on the place and role gardens hold in our lives, especially at difficult times. The work of these two accomplished artists will, without doubt, resonate with our audiences at a moment when the promise of spring turns into the profusion of summer, and when the fragile balance of our world is in a continuous negotiation.”
—Adelina Vlas, Head of Curatorial Affairs
The new exhibition season will be animated by engaging, free public programs, including thematic talks, workshops, and tours. We’re also excited to welcome families and kids aged 7-12 for an engaging new series of creative Power Kids workshops on select Sundays. Visit The Power Plant’s Event Calendar on our website for programming details.
Emmanuel Osahor, Room for two, 2023. Oil on canvas. Photo: Joseph Hartman.
Emmanuel Osahor: To dream of other places
Curator
Adelina Vlas, Head of Curatorial Affairs
Emmanuel Osahor’s practice focuses on beauty as a necessity for survival, respite, and sanctuary. Known primarily for his paintings of lush, verdant gardenscapes—inspired by real and imagined locations—these works meditate upon the complicated histories of these sites that entail the domestication of lands, plants, and individuals alike. To dream of other places is the artist’s first major solo presentation in his home city of Toronto and includes paintings, drawings, prints, ceramic sculptures, and a new, site-specific photographic wallpaper. Conceived as a night garden, the exhibition presents Osahor’s work in a unique environment intended to immerse the viewer in a contemplative space where feelings of delight and sorrow coexist as reflections of human experience. The artist’s poetic yet critical approach to a subject that has been well represented throughout art history reflects a practice that is profoundly engaged with beauty, painting, and the everyday at a time when meaningful encounters with art are needed more than ever.
Shelagh Keeley, still from Jardim do Ultramar / The Colonial Garden, Lisbon, Portugal, 2016. Film, 180 min. Thanks to the Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon, Portugal and Ifa Gallery Stuttgart, Germany. Courtesy the artist.
Shelagh Keeley: Film Notebooks 1985-2017
Curator
Adelina Vlas, Head of Curatorial Affairs
At the core of Shelagh Keeley’s work is a drawing practice based on an intuitive and embodied response to readings and research in poetry, politics, cinema, and architecture. The artist applies the same approach to her work with film, where the moving image becomes a drawing notebook, a travel journal, an opportunity to bring the viewer into the spaces experienced by the artist and mediated through the lens of the hand-held camera. Since 1985, Keeley has documented on film her encounters with gardens and uniquely built environments around the world. The resulting film notebooks quietly, yet poignantly, reveal the layered histories and contexts that created them at different moments in time. From the flamboyant artificiality of a desert oasis in Las Vegas to the discipline of a Zen Garden in Kyoto, and from a colonial garden in Lisbon to the largest European zoological-botanical garden in Stuttgart, the films invite us to contemplate the complexity and intangible essence–genius loci or spirit of the place–Keeley felt in these places. Filmed while walking for hours at a time as a flâneuse, the moving image notebooks present an invitation for the viewer to become the artist as she draws with the camera, investigating and uncovering the visceral, hidden layers of these locations.
About The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery is Canada’s leading public gallery devoted to contemporary art, ideas, and conversations. Located at Harbourfront Centre on Toronto’s waterfront, The Power Plant is a vital forum for the creative culture of our time, sharing inspiring and transformative experiences with audiences through free admission to exhibitions and public programs. The Power Plant is guided by the commitment to provide a platform for artists from diverse backgrounds, drawing attention to pressing issues and connecting communities in Canada and worldwide through contemporary art. For more information, please visit thepowerplant.org.
If you are interested in attending the Press Preview, would like to request an interview, or receive advanced images and the artist’s biographies, please email media@thepowerplant.org.