{"id":275670,"date":"2026-05-01T16:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T21:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/compte-rendu\/natia-lemay-what-the-edge-knows\/"},"modified":"2026-05-06T14:40:25","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T19:40:25","slug":"natia-lemay-what-the-edge-knows","status":"publish","type":"compte-rendu","link":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/reviews\/natia-lemay-what-the-edge-knows\/","title":{"rendered":"Natia Lemay<\/br>What the Edge Knows<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Black is a reflecting pool of autoethnographic exploration in Natia Lemay\u2019s richly varied body of work supported by the CIBC C2<\/sup> 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\u2019s research on CIBC\u2019s original headquarters, located about four hundred metres north of CIBC Square.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
The centrepiece of Lemay\u2019s visual essay was The Meeting Place <\/em>(2025), a stunning allegory of Toronto\u2019s contemporary and immemorial identities as a place of cultural encounter. The painting\u2019s ambiguous setting collapses allusions to the black oak savannah cultivated by the region\u2019s Indigenous peoples for millennia into suggestions of a present-day domestic interior. The complex interaction of figures and gazes showcases Lemay\u2019s 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\u2019s proto-minimalist experimentation with colours at the borderline of visibility; The Meeting Place <\/em>substitutes the silky sheen of fabric and winding coils of hair for the generic modernist grid of Reinhardt\u2019s monochromes. In conversation with the assured figuration of The Meeting Place<\/em>, a series of smaller paintings called Echoes <\/em>amplified and distilled the larger work\u2019s 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 Vel\u00e1zquez\u2019s Las Meninas <\/em>(1656) famously converge on a mirror reflecting the gazes of the Spanish monarchs, Echoes <\/em>transforms mirrored passages from The Meeting Place <\/em>into a scintillating montage of fragments that refuse optical resolution. With its arching forest canopy, the hallowed atmosphere of Contours of Relation <\/em>(2025) conjures Toronto\u2019s first Wesleyan Methodist Church, which, from 1818 to 1833, occupied the future site of CIBC\u2019s now former headquarters, Commerce Court. The church was a known sanctuary for Black refugees fleeing slavery in the American South. Together, Contours of Relation <\/em>and The Space that Gathers <\/em>(2025) constitute Lemay\u2019s first forays into landscape painting that don\u2019t 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\u2019kmaw, 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\u200a\u2013\u200a1954) are finally receiving their due thanks to the research of scholars such as Adrienne Johnson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\"Natia
Natia Lemay
<\/strong>Contours of Relation; The Space that Gathers<\/em>, installation view, 
CIBC Square, Toronto, 2025.
Photo: LF Documentation, courtesy of the artist & CIBC<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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The sculptural quality of Lemay\u2019s textured application of black pigment struck a natural resonance with her three-dimensional works. Resting on Soft Ground <\/em>(2025) and To Hold Without Demand <\/em>(2025) translated Lemay\u2019s painterly play of illusionism and material facticity into potent juxtapositions of dark woods and soapstone. The tense theatre of river stones suspended between reclaimed house timbers in Before it Gives Way <\/em>(2025) powerfully extended Lemay\u2019s pictorial excavations of place into three dimensions. Overlapping temporalities of settlement and erosion condense Lemay\u2019s broader vision of historical moments as coexisting conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\"Natia
Natia Lemay
<\/strong>Before it Gives Way<\/em>, installation view, CIBC Square, 
Toronto, 2025.
Photo: LF Documentation, courtesy of the artist & CIBC<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CIBC Square,<\/strong> Toronto<\/br>October 1, 2025\u200a\u2013\u200aFebruary 5, 2026 <\/br><\/br><\/br>","protected":false},"author":6506,"featured_media":275656,"template":"","categories":[884],"numeros":[8014],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[832],"artistes":[8080],"thematiques":[],"type_compte-rendu":[],"class_list":["post-275670","compte-rendu","type-compte-rendu","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","numeros-117-crip","auteurs-adam-lauder","artistes-natia-lemay-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/compte-rendu\/275670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/compte-rendu"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/compte-rendu"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6506"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275670"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=275670"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=275670"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=275670"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=275670"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=275670"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=275670"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=275670"},{"taxonomy":"type_compte-rendu","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_compte-rendu?post=275670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}