Afterimage brings together ten artists across Canada working in painting, print, ceramic, sculpture, and digital media. Through varied material approaches, they engage the theme of transference — the passage of something from one place, surface, person, or time to another. In psychotherapy, the term is also used to describe moments when feelings meant for an important figure from our past land on someone new. Transference persists on the retina, in the body, in memory, leaving an afterimage long after the source is gone.

Some works in this exhibition dwell on the traces left behind. Aldeneil Española weaves used makeup wipes into textile, pigments lifted from their face to become a living archive of a queer, diasporic self. Hau Pham paints the fake nails and lashes that many East Asian women adopt as body, until the products are removed and reverted to object, or refuse. Taaye's monotypes are meticulously made through repetitive transferring, using a footless cockatoo as her motif for perpetual rootlessness, a home on which it is impossible to land. Jordyn Julianna's wide-eyed unicorn, adorned with stickers saved from her childhood, asks us to look into it for the girl who believed in magic: she's still here.

Other works examine transference in motion. Parumveer Walia's mirrored portraits of mother and son trace an otherwise invisible transmission of femininity and social codes between generations. Gabriela García-Luna's flora drift between the Canadian prairies and Mexico, two homes fusing into hybrid geographies belonging to memory and imagination at once. Nicole Bie's ceramic vessels, carved with symbols lifted from her personal life and family history, commemorate an inherited grief for a faraway homeland known only in glimpses. Nick Lakowski paints modest objects found on his neighbourhood's Buy Nothing forum, where surplus circulates between strangers as small gestures of generosity reaching for connection. Lastly, in Sophia Boutsakis and Anais Casselman-Green's paired lamps, light itself travels between glass and clay, as authorship and craftsmanship pass between the two collaborators.

In Afterimage, transference takes many forms: knowledge circulation, prosthetic femininity, self-revelation, and inherited grief. What passes leaves residue; what we shed also becomes an ongoing archive of our unfolding.