The Power Plant

The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery opens its fall 2026 exhibition season this October, bringing together a variety of practices by artists exploring place, identity, ecology, and the worlds that connect us. All exhibitions at The Power Plant are free.

The season is led by the first major exhibition in Toronto by Vancouver-born, UK-based artist Zadie Xa, created with longtime collaborator, artist Benito Mayor Vallejo, and Fogo, a solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed Los Angeles-based artist Sharon Lockhart that includes her most recent film WINDWARD and a suite of new photographs. Also on view is Owner of a Lonely Heart, an 80-minute moving image program featuring Haig Aivazian, Stephanie Comilang, Alia Farid, Hope Pearl Strickland, and Yuyan Wang, alongside new commissions by Ella Gonzales and Sami Tsang, while Morgan Sears-Williams’s work takes over the South Facade Billboard. Curated by The Vega Foundation in dialogue with The Power Plant, Fogo and Owner of a Lonely Heart continue the two organizations’ ongoing partnership.

On Friday, October 23 from 7 PM to 9 PM, The Power Plant invites the public to celebrate the opening of the season with an evening at the gallery and the first opportunity to experience the new exhibitions together. Admission is free and advance RSVP is recommended at The Power Plant’s website.

“This season brings together artists who use different approaches to tell stories about how we relate to our complex world at this moment in time,” said Adelina Vlas, Artistic Director, The Power Plant. “There is an incredible range of experiences across the galleries - from Zadie Xa and Benito Mayor Vallejo’s immersive world of painting, mythology and sound, to Sharon Lockhart’s extraordinary film and portraits created on Fogo Island. We invite audiences to spend time with these exhibitions, the program of recent moving image works accompanying it, and the site-specific projects by Ella Gonzales, Morgan Sears-Williams and Sami Tsang.”

Zadie Xa with Benito Mayor Vallejo

Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything

In her first major exhibition in Toronto, Zadie Xa transforms The Power Plant with an immersive installation created with longtime collaborator, artist Benito Mayor Vallejo. Expansive and multilayered, the exhibition combines a range of media—including a sound installation, a hand-painted mural of saturated twilight colours, and delicate bronze sculptures of hybrid figures dancing between human and animal worlds, co-authored by both artists—with intimate and large-scale paintings by Xa that often incorporate textile panels evoking traditional Korean patchwork quilting. Visitors will experience a vibrant, multi-sensory environment that connects Xa’s ongoing exploration of storytelling, Korean mythology, folklore, diasporic identity, and marine ecology to the shores of Lake Ontario.

Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything is organized and developed in partnership with Esker Foundation, Calgary, where it was on view from May 23 to August 23, 2026, and PHI, Montréal, where it will be on view from April 29 to September 12, 2027.

The Power Plant gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Partners in Art; and recognizes Armstrong Fine Art Services as the exhibition's Shipping and Logistics Partner. We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts for its support of the tour of this exhibition.

Sharon Lockhart

Fogo

The Vega Foundation and The Power Plant have co-organized an exhibition every year since 2022. Through this annual collaboration, both organizations bring their international reach to strengthen the presentation and appreciation of artists’ film and video in Canada. This year we are thrilled to present Fogo, internationally acclaimed Los Angeles-based artist Sharon Lockhart’s most recent body of work, created over four summers on Fogo Island in Newfoundland.

Landscape is central to this exhibition, in particular the geological formations, austere beauty, and manifestations of the island’s distinctive climate. The exhibition features Fogo Island Portrait Studio, 2025, a series of photographs of young residents of the island, alongside WINDWARD, 2025, a film in which the artist carefully observes the island’s geography, and directs its youth in play amid its striking, vast landscape.

Fogo is organized and developed by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and The Vega Foundation. Curated by Julia Paoli, Director and Curator, The Vega Foundation, with Kate Whiteway, Assistant Curator, The Vega Foundation, in dialogue with the curatorial team at The Power Plant. The Vega Foundation provides critical support for artists’ film and video through meaningful investments in the production of ambitious new work, collaborations with Canadian and international institutions, and the stewardship of a growing collection. For more information, please visit www.thevegafoundation.com.

WINDWARD is co-commissioned and co-produced by Shorefast/Fogo Island Arts, The Vega Foundation and the National Gallery of Canada, with the support of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

Owner of a Lonely Heart

Haig Aivazian, Stephanie Comilang, Alia Farid, Hope Pearl Strickland and Yuyan Wang

The Power Plant's partnership with The Vega Foundation extends to our North Gallery where we are proud to present the five works featured in Owner of a Lonely Heart. The 80-minute moving image program follows raw materials as they are transformed into products, and moved around the world, from rivers in Jamaica to the North of England; the wetlands of southern Iraq; the maritime Philippines, Dubai, and China; the port of Beirut to the streets of New York; and finally, to the fluid streams of images circulating online. Through documentary, narrative, archival and experimental approaches, the artists reveal connections between extraction, labour, landscapes and the people whose lives are shaped by them.

Owner of a Lonely Heart is organized and developed by The Power Plant and The Vega Foundation. Curated by Julia Paoli, Director and Curator, The Vega Foundation, with Kate Whiteway, Assistant Curator, The Vega Foundation, in dialogue with the curatorial team at The Power Plant. The Vega Foundation's mission is to support the commissioning and presentation of moving image artworks in collaboration with international public institutions.

Ella Gonzales

A Room’s Proportion, above or below

The Power Plant continues its longstanding Fleck Clerestory Commission Program with Ella Gonzales’s A Room’s Proportion, above or below. The work transforms the gallery with layers of painted, translucent fabric based on the proportions of domestic interiors recalled by the artist from memory. As one remembered space is superimposed onto another, visitors move through overlapping rooms, histories and perspectives. Evoking the notion of the threshold, Gonzales considers what happens when one condition slips into another, and how traces of what came before remain visible in what follows.

Sami Tsang

What We Carry Forward

Marking the inaugural Smokestack Commission Program, What We Carry Forward is a site-specific work by ceramic and mixed-media artist Sami Tsang. The large-scale ink mural is inspired by childhood shadow puppetry and populated by tiny porcelain figurines of girls. Some climb, rest and wander, while others carry silver butterfly wings that double as armour. Through this imagined world of play, protection and collective movement, Tsang considers the quieter inheritances passed between generations, and what each chooses to preserve, transform or leave behind.

Morgan Sears-Williams

feeling along the edges

Presented on The Power Plant’s South Facade Billboard, feeling along the edges was created during the artist’s 2023 residency at Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts on Mnisiing (the Toronto Islands). The image, which consists of several 16mm film strips collated into one frame, captures Hanlan’s Point Beach, a site of queer community and refuge. Witnessing the gradual geological erosion that is currently occurring there, Sears-Williams filmed the beach, holding the camera at hip height to capture the lakefront and intimate details of the shoreline. She then developed the film in instant coffee and buried it in the sand for five days. The beach residue altered the film’s emulsion, producing scratches, abrasions, and other material artifacts. The resulting work mirrors the ecological disintegration of Hanlan’s Point with the disappearance of longstanding public spaces for queer communities.

Fall Public Programming

Throughout the season, audiences can encounter the artists, places and ideas behind the exhibitions through talks, exhibition tours, screenings and special events, including the Cross Circuits Speakers Series, featuring Professors Michael Brendan Baker and John Shiga responding to the exhibitions of Sharon Lockhart and Zadie Xa; artist talks with Ella Gonzales, Morgan Sears Williams, Sami Tsang and Zadie Xa; and performances commissioned by KUUMBA 365, a celebration of Black culture, featuring an iteration centred on music theatre. For a full list of upcoming programs, please visit thepowerplant.org.

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 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.