Amanda Boulos
Ali Eyal
Kristan Horton
Joseph E. Yoakum
Exhibition: 18 July - 31 August, 2024
190 St Helen's Avenue, Toronto
Hours: Wednesday to Saturday, 12 to 5pm
CRG is thrilled to present Hope Dies Last, a group show that brings together four distinctly different artists. The exhibition is mounted in a spirit of optimism, inquiry, imagination and perseverance. "Wherever my mind led me, I would go," Joseph Yoakum said. "I've been all over this world four times." Kristan Horton is widely known for being deeply, obsessively rooted in his studio practice, his mind a crucible. "I often call my aesthetic something I arrive at," he said. "And I celebrate my arrivals in these foreign lands-the more foreign, the better." When the critic and writer Kaelen Wilson-Goldie asked Ali Eyal how he became an artist, he said "The Iraqi sun taught me how to draw." Eyal uses art "to find new ways of seeing and hearing stories, and I'm always trying to find a new story at the back of my head. All the works are based on a fictional farm that I've created and keep returning to, but with different stories and different scenarios. I see the various media as witnessing tools, like inside a courtroom, but all based on my mind and memories." Amanda Boulos is a Palestinian artist based in Toronto. She feels that "The ability to see one culture against another definitely magnifies life. It influences my practice and supplies me with endless content that I can admire, question and learn from."
Hope dies last was a phrase spoken most prominently by Jessie Lopez De La Cruz (1919 - 2013), a Chicano-American migrant field worker from the age of 5 who later organized the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez and was its first female recruiter. A tireless advocate for all those like her, toiling under a broiling sun, she was an activist till her death at 93 and was immortalized by Studs Terkel in his book, titled after de la Cruz's indelible words.
A big thank you to Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council for making this project possible!