Main Gallery: Kelly Grace, Crossfade
Exhibited: April 4 – May 3, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, April 4th, 5-8 PM
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Artist will be in attendance
Cinema is a series of transitions – scenes dissolving into one another, moments blurring together in time. Crossfade explores the liminal space between reality and imagination, memory and projection. Through a series of expressive paintings, Kelly Grace captures streetscapes, narratives, and crowds immersed in vintage 3D movie experiences, evoking the collective wonder and illusion that cinema so powerfully produces.
Known for her cinematic sensibility, Kelly Grace draws on the aesthetics of the 1950s and 1960s, staging her compositions with the precision of a film director. Working in series and often photographing her own references using period props, she constructs each painting like a movie still.
The works in Crossfade span several of Kelly Grace’s thematic blocks, including paintings inspired by vintage cinema and graphic novels, her iconic women in swimming caps, and atmospheric depictions of Canadian everyday life. In her cityscapes and interiors, Grace emphasizes the emotional presence of place itself, turning overlooked spaces into quiet, self-sufficient worlds typical of Toronto’s urban rhythm. Women often take center stage in Grace’s narratives – not only as protagonists but also as enigmas. Whether captured in cinematic moments or rendered in striking close-up with oversized sunglasses or swimming caps, these figures project self-possession, glamour, and introspection.
Crossfade also offers a rare glimpse into the artist’s process. Colour studies, preparatory sketches, and experiments with colour grading are presented alongside finished works, foregrounding the mechanics behind the emotion. Much like in film editing – where tone, light, and sequence shape a scene – these elements expose how each painting is constructed through deliberate visual choices. Grace’s painted world is a meditation on storytelling and vision—a portal into the past viewed through the cool blue screen of an old television. Crossfade invites us to linger in these moments of transition, when reality dissolves into reverie.