paper light shadows
Winter Garden is a large-scale immersive shadow installation that explores historical structures built to possess and colonize plants from all over the world. First built in 19th-century Europe, winter gardens were structures made of cast iron and plate glass to house collections of exotic foliage. These indoor gardens served as a testament to the power and wealth of those with the means to possess them, and to the power and technological knowledge possessed by whomever built them. This exhibition at the McClure Gallery combines the delicacy of cut paper with imagery inspired by historical winter garden structures at two Montreal locations: The Verdun Greenhouses and the Montreal Botanical Gardens.
By drawing on the colonial origins of these elaborate indoor gardens, this exhibition connects contemporary migration, displacement and housing struggles with a historical lineage of systemic dispossession of plants, animals, and humans. In Winter Garden, Mere Phantoms artists Jaimie Robson and Maya Ersan use the fragility of cut paper to reflect on the crude politics of spaces built to house living things.
January 9 - February 14, 2026 Centre Des Arts Visuel Galerie McClure, Westmount, Quebec