November 18 – 29, 2026
Gallery Hours: 12 pm to 5 pm, Wednesday to Sunday
“All cities are mad, but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim.”
Christopher Morley
Built of concrete, glass and steel, bound by the legalese of property ownership, land deeds, and landlord-tenant agreements, and sustained by a litany of maintenance obligations, cities are where eighty-five percent of Canadians live their lives. Neighbourhoods of clustered cultures, well-beaten shortcuts, and the history evolving around them translate into a municipal identity. Past, Present, Future is a 2-person exhibition that interprets this identity through a lens of growth and decline.
Using recontextualized film fragments, video artist Brian R Donnelly looks to the past as he charts psychogeographic paths through Toronto. Here, a dialogue between nostalgia and modernity emerges, revealing how the imagined landscapes of film and the lived geographies of a city intertwine. Skirting the legalities of copyright, Donnelly’s work challenges the ownership of a disjointed cultural archive and the city as a living organism shaped by collective imagination.
Looking forward, Jason van Horne imagines a world after people. Presented as a scratch-built, scale-model city being slowly reclaimed by wildlife. The absence of human systems nullifies the authority of ownership. Upon closer inspection, the buildings are made of consumer waste: reused cardboard boxes, plastic packaging, and fragments of obsolete electronics and broken toys. Gazing at the skyscrapers of refuse, the truth of our endowment to the future takes on a darkly sinister cast, raising the question of whether our thirst for convenience binds us to a contract of our own demise.
Jason van Horne: ” The City” During the pandemic I had the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it on my mind a lot. While apocalyptic themes have often been a part of my miniature work, the doomsday clock seemed to be getting especially close to midnight. So I started collecting the numerous boxes from online shopping that were coming to our house at the time and turning them into abandoned office towers, crumbling apartment buildings and burnt-out storefronts.
Jason van Horne graduated from the Ontario College of Art & Design Sculpture/Installation program in 2002. Co-founder of the public art project City Beautification Ensemble and the community arts collective The Soft City. Jason has been exhibiting work nationally since 2000, including exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto and Harbourfront Centre.
@jvh_miniart
Brian Donnelly: “Goin’ Down The Road” is an exhibition of video works that explore the city of Toronto through the lens of fiction. Positioned somewhere between piracy and cartography, my work recontextualizes fragments of film footage to shift focus from foreground narrative to background geography. What emerges are surreal documentations of a city evolving over decades, posing questions about the distortion of social identity and contesting the ownership of recorded municipal history.
Brian R Donnelly (b. 1979) began his career as a painter. Exhibiting internationally since 2007, he began experimenting with video in 2018. His work has been included in museum screenings and multiple international film festivals, taking top honours for experimental film at Toronto Film Week (2025), Screener Short Film Fest (2024), and the Façade Video Festival (2024).
briandonnelly.org – torontofilmboard.com – @bbbriandonnelly – @torontofilmboard
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