Natia Lemay
What the Edge Knows

Black is a reflecting pool of autoethnographic exploration in Natia Lemay’s richly varied body of work supported by the CIBC C2 Art Program. An ambitious suite of canvases and a materially adventurous ensemble of sculptures unfolded timely meditations on site and social history inspired by Lemay’s research on CIBC’s original headquarters, located about four hundred metres north of CIBC Square.

The centrepiece of Lemay’s visual essay was The Meeting Place (2025), a stunning allegory of Toronto’s contemporary and immemorial identities as a place of cultural encounter. The painting’s ambiguous setting collapses allusions to the black oak savannah cultivated by the region’s Indigenous peoples for millennia into suggestions of a present-day domestic interior. The complex interaction of figures and gazes showcases Lemay’s compositional acumen and virtuosic paint handling. But her genius shines brightest through her signature modulation of a nuanced spectrum of blacks. Contrasting areas of glossy impasto and matte washes testify to the astonishing versatility of black pigments, expertly extended by Lemay using wax and gel mediums. Her material investigations of the diverse potentialities of black recall the formal rigour of Ad Reinhardt’s proto-minimalist experimentation with colours at the borderline of visibility; The Meeting Place substitutes the silky sheen of fabric and winding coils of hair for the generic modernist grid of Reinhardt’s monochromes. In conversation with the assured figuration of The Meeting Place, a series of smaller paintings called Echoes amplified and distilled the larger work’s restrained drama of surface incident into stand-alone works of haunting near–abstraction. Telescoping lambent reflections and wood-grain patterns into an ambiguous personal script, the reflective logic of these paintings ingeniously disperses the perspectival concentration of power embodied by Western traditions of picture making. Where, for instance, the charged sightlines of Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) famously converge on a mirror reflecting the gazes of the Spanish monarchs, Echoes transforms mirrored passages from The Meeting Place into a scintillating montage of fragments that refuse optical resolution. With its arching forest canopy, the hallowed atmosphere of Contours of Relation (2025) conjures Toronto’s first Wesleyan Methodist Church, which, from 1818 to 1833, occupied the future site of CIBC’s now former headquarters, Commerce Court. The church was a known sanctuary for Black refugees fleeing slavery in the American South. Together, Contours of Relation and The Space that Gathers (2025) constitute Lemay’s first forays into landscape painting that don’t include figures. The evocation of site-specific histories of Black and Indigenous visions of the lands now known as Canada by Lemay, herself an artist of Black, Mi’kmaw, and Acadian ancestry, coincides with a broader moment of art-historical recovery in which Black and Indigenous landscape painters such as Edith Hester McDonald-Brown (1886 – 1954) are finally receiving their due thanks to the research of scholars such as Adrienne Johnson.