September 26th, 2026 - October 15th, 2026
Opening reception September 26th, 5:30-8:00
4910 21A street SW Calgary AB
(and by appointment, text: 403.401.7890)

Asea on Two Boats

Zimra Beiner
Matthew Gil
Dara Humniski
Curated by Nate McLeod

This exhibition brings together the work of three artists who have momentarily abandoned the anchors of their primary mediums, choosing instead to navigate the unsettling space of an unmastered craft. By relinquishing the mediums that they are most familiar with, these artists invite friction, vulnerability, and a raw sense of wonder back into the studio. The resulting works are not mere departures; they are representations of central themes and ideas filtered through a new lens.

Dara Humniski translates an ongoing exploration of the natural world from drawing into ceramics. Drawing on her history as a florist, Humniski creates ceramic vases topped with delicate grids inspired by traditional tulipiere vases or flower bricks. Her practice, typically rooted in the graphic precision of marks made through stencils, transfer paper, or stamps, shifts into three dimensions: clay structures that now separate and hold individual stems, creating a dialogue between organic life and geometric restraint.

Zimra Beiner reverses this alchemy, collapsing the weight of sculptural ceramic works into flat works on paper. Beiner constructs ink drawings that mimic the transformations of clay: paper is flattened, cut, perforated, taped into volumes, saturated with liquid, dried to a dull matte, and glue back together. By forcing ink and moisture through these constructed paper forms, he draws a profound parallel to the ceramic studio, channeling the rhythms of flattening, wetting, building, drying, firing, and glazing onto the two-dimensional plane.

Matthew Gil bridges the fluid boundary between painting and ceramics, exploring the concept of plasticity across dimensions. Known for his intuitive, abstract paintings, Gil treats both canvas and clay as spaces born from the physical act of working: trading the illusion of depth on a flat plane for the literal volume of a vessel. These ceramic works – vessels he refers to as his angels – demonstrate a painterly devotion to texture and colour while evoking the lifted transcendent forms of chalices and goblets.

To stand asea on two boats is to inhabit a state of deliberate instability. It is a precarious balancing act — one foot planted in the familiar, the other testing a new direction. While the idiom never sail on two boats implies an impending failure if one divides their focus, the artists in the exhibition successfully navigate the divide, maintaining a fruitful balance within the fertile territory of reinvention.

BRANCUSI'S TRINITY

BRANCUSI'S TRINITY is an experimental exploration of the esoteric correlations between three of Brancusi’s sculptures, positing them as an inseparable and holistic Trinity by examining their spatial, numerological, and Hermetic interrelations. Extensive diagrams show the increasingly enfolded and enmeshed relationships between these three sculptures and detail how they appear in, and inform, one another. Clements proposes that the reception of art can open up a site for latent esoteric intelligences to appear, focused around the Hermetic Principle of Correspondence: “As Above, So Below.” The text is accompanied by an additional essay on ‘Magic, Phenomenology, and the Occult,’ which touches upon relationships between sleight of hand magic, perception, the tarot, and some surprising correlations between Harry Houdini and Aleister Crowley.

Hildegard Press is an artist publishing project that is for the collection and distribution of printed matter concerned with the periphery, the marginal, and the outside, in order to make the edge the centre of focus. The press draws inspiration from the 12th century mystical nun Hildegard von Bingen, who produced botanical works, music, epiphanic visions, as well as inventing languages and writing esoteric philosophy. Hildegard Press aims to publish reflections on outsider or mystical practices, archival texts, as well as providing space for artists and writers to produce publications that fall outside the scope of their professional practice.