Presented in conjunction with Corkin Gallery and Gallery Weekend Toronto, join Noor Alé, Christian Butterfield and Miles Gertler for an exhibition talk about To Will One Thing. Butterfield and Gertler will be discussing their works, with Alé guiding the conversation through her curatorial perspective. The talk will be followed by an open question and answer period.
Noor Alé
Associate Curator at The Power Plant
Noor Alé is a curator, art historian, and writer. She is the Associate Curator at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto. Her curatorial practice examines the intersections of contemporary art with geopolitics, migration, and cosmologies in the Global South. At The Power Plant, she curated Sasha Huber: YOU NAME IT, Hiwa K: Do you remember what you are burning?, and she was the institutional curator for Arctic/Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity. She is currently working on forthcoming exhibitions by Abdelkader Benchamma: Solastalgia: Archaeologies of Loss, and Anna Boghigiuan: Time of Change.
In her independent practice, she curated this is not an atlas, Visual Arts Centre of Clarington; Valentin Brown: Welcome to My Regulated Body, Art Windsor-Essex; Here Comes the Sun, Art Gallery of Burlington; OF THE SACRED, Critical Distance Centre for Curators, Toronto; and Allis well on the border, and LAW & (DIS)ORDER, both for Vtape, Toronto.
She was awarded curatorial residencies at SOMA, Mexico City; Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; and Shanghai Curators Lab, as well as a fellowship at the Association of Art Museum Curators, New York. She holds an MA in Art History from The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where she specialized in photography, film, and video in global contemporary art.
Christian Butterfield
Toronto based artist Christian Butterfield (b.1995) is known for his collage portraits and nature-based paintings. The artist utilizes collage to timestamp moments in the past and reference personal conversations as an exercise of internal reconciliation and catharsis of past relationships with former lovers, friends and acquaintances. Butterfield’s mixed media surrealist blooms, known as the “Apology Flowers”, have expanded into a sophisticated handling of paint depicting landscapes with mindful depictions of light, sprouting from multiple directions, intending to depict an internal glow to destabilize perspective.
Born in 1995 in Toronto Canada, Christian Butterfield’s first love was cartoons. At a young age, animation sparked his first artistic inclination and he began drawing characters and creating flipbook animations. Uninterested in school, this prompted educators to funnel him into various classes, whose job it was to shuttle students from classroom to classroom and school to school for those who require extra supervision. This educational environment enabled him to befriend many so-called outliers, and this educational trajectory continued throughout high school. After high school he spent less than a year at the Centennial Collage fine arts program, however soon left to complete his first portrait series. A series of nine portraits, where each face was made up of an amalgamation of facial features from friends to create whole new characters.
Christian Butterfield, mainly self-taught, was awarded a place in the School of Visual Arts Residency Program, Fine Arts: Contemporary Practices, New York City in June 2022. In 2018, he held a residency at the AKIN Studio Program at the Musuem of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Toronto. Corkin Gallery presented his inaugural solo exhibition, Green Light, in September 2021. His work has been included in a number of group shows at Corkin Gallery, including presentations at Art Toronto. Butterfield’s work was featured in NOW Toronto in 2020 as one of the most covetable pieces of the year.
Miles Gertler
Artist, Co-Director of Common Accounts, and Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream at the University of Toronto
Miles Gertler is a visual artist and co-director of Common Accounts, a studio for design inquiry. Originally trained in architecture, his work in image and sculpture is animated by under-the-radar aesthetic histories and an interest in speculation. He is Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream at University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, and studied architecture at Princeton University. Gertler’s work and writing has been featured in Perspecta, e-flux, 032c, PIN-UP, Frame Magazine, Neo2, El Pais, The Cornell Journal of Architecture, The Globe and Mail, The Architectural Review, and the Avery Review, and has been exhibited at MOCA (Toronto), the MMCA (Seoul), the Seoul Museum of Art, The Canadian Centre for Architecture, Art Jameel (Dubai), Azkuna Zentroa (Bilbao), The Cube Design Museum (Kerkrade), The Venice Architecture Bienniale, The Bienal de Arquitectura Española, The Istanbul Design Biennial, The Seoul Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism, a83 gallery (New York), and Corkin Gallery. Gertler was a 2023 resident at Palazzo Monti in Brescia, Italy, and has been a board member at Mercer Union, A Centre for Contemporary Art, since 2019.
