March 21 – April 26, 2025
Opening reception:
Friday March 21, 6-8pm
COOPER COLE, Toronto, Canada
↓ InformationCOOPER COLE is pleased to present Gathering, a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Hangama Amiri and Melissa Joseph.
Through fibre, cloth, and the intimacy of handwork, both artists trace the ways memory lingers – how it clings to fabric, how it eases with time, how it sharpens like the first taste of something long forgotten.
Across the works presented in this exhibition, food appears as both subject and symbol—a conduit for memory, a site of intimacy, a language of belonging. Joseph’s felted compositions soften archival images of family memories related to shared meals, transforming them into dreamlike impressions of family, diaspora, and time’s quiet erosion. Amiri’s sewn textiles reconstruct intimate scenes of dining tables, celebrating spaces where cultural identity is prepared, consumed, and passed down. In her works, food is both nourishment and nostalgia, a reminder of places left behind and those reimagined in new lands.
Working across felting, quilting, and stitched compositions, Amiri and Joseph translate personal and collective histories into tactile landscapes. Dissolving the boundaries between past and present, evoking the fragility of memory and the tenderness of its recall. Both artists create artworks which construct fragmented geographies, where domestic and cultural spaces are stitched together like remnants of a life in motion. Theirs is a language of touch. Through the slow gestures of making—pressing fiber, pulling thread, assembling cloth— Amiri and Joseph preserve moments otherwise ephemeral. Like recipes passed down in family kitchens, both artists’ works hold the textures of home, migration, and longing, carrying forward the imprint of what was.
Gathering is an ode to the ways we inherit and reconstruct our pasts, where recollection is something not just remembered, but experienced through all our senses.
To learn more about this exhibition, please provide your contact information.
Hangama Amiri
The Dinner Table
The Dinner Table, 2024
Denim, cotton, chiffon, linen, muslin, silk, dye canvas, polyester, gauze, velvet, mesh polyester, and Jack Lenor Larson fabrics
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Hangama Amiri
Still-life with Oysters and Lucky Lime
Still-life with Oysters and Lucky Lime, 2025
Muslin, cotton, polyester, chiffon, silk, linen, color-pencil, block-print and acrylic paint on fabric
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Hangama Amiri
Still-life with Almonds on Afghan Textile
Still-life with Almonds on Afghan Textile, 2022
Colour pencil on paper
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Hangama Amiri
Eid
Eid, 2022
Colour pencil on paper
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Melissa Joseph
Thanksgiving 1986
Thanksgiving 1986, 2025
Needle felted wool and recycled sari silk
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Melissa Joseph
Olive’s Unicorn Tea
Olive's Unicorn Tea, 2025
Needle felted wool on industrial felt
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