COOPER COLE is pleased to announce our participation in NADA Miami 2022. The gallery will present a group exhibition highlighting some of our most exciting emerging and mid-career artists: Hangama Amiri, Jorian Charlton, Sara Cwynar, Timothy Yanick Hunter, Paul P., and Jagdeep Raina.

These artists possess distinctive visual languages and transformative ways of understanding their identities and lived experiences. In the realm of photography, Cwynar’s work is interested in the way that images accumulate, endure, and change in value over time. Her conceptual photographs involve constant archiving and re-presentation of collected visual materials, intricately recalling advertisements, retail catalogues, and old art history textbooks. While Charlton—one of Canada’s most exciting emerging artists—focuses on Jamaican-Canadian culture through her personal experiences and that of her community, working with her models to create images that tell stories about Caribbean diasporas while addressing contemporary modes of Black representation. Relatedly, Hunter considers both digital and physical interpolations around image making, using forms of looping, rhythm, and repetition to reimagine new orientations for understanding local and diasporic narratives.

In the realm of textile, Amiri uses fabric as both a reference to traditional Afghan textile techniques, as well as an embracing of fabrics’ relationship to the body, insinuations of touch, and its ability to carry memories. These works foreground the day to day events and contexts of Afghan women in the wake of the Taliban’s rise to power that has severely limited how women navigate social spaces. Also working in textile, Raina uses Phulkari tapestry techniques that originate in Punjab to explore the experiences of diverse Kashmiri and Punjabi diasporas.

Bridging these media, P.’s paintings on linen are portraits of unknown individuals taken from photographs in the Gay and Lesbian archives in Toronto and gay erotic magazines, specifically those produced in the years bracketed by the beginning of gay liberation and the advent of the AIDS crisis; a period of provisional freedoms.

These artists are exemplary at commenting on diverse conditions and experiences of contemporary life, culminating in a visually striking and conceptually pertinent presentation.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.