Join Talent Trust scholarship recipient Excel Garay for their solo exhibition, Gaba o Buyag, I will always hide many things from you, at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, February 15 - 19, 2022.
Excel was the winner of the 2021 RBC BIPOC Emerging Artist Award.
About the exhibit:
Through tones of ultramarine blue, Garay paints plastic ready-mades, found objects, and immersive installations alongside paintings to summon the invisible hauntings that support the Global North. In Gaba o Buyag, I will always hide many things from you, they wish to explore themes of melodrama, baroque excess, hauntology, fugitivity, time, and invisible labor through a transnational queer necropolitical lens. ‘Ultramarine’ originated from the Latin term ultramarinus, which means ‘from beyond the seas’. It references the heavily extracted mineral called Lapis Lazuli, which is known to decorate the body of the Virgin Mary during the Renaissance period.
About Excel Garay:
Excel Garay is a Filipina Canadian diasporic settler occupying Mi'kma’ki territory in K’jipuktuk, Eskikewa’kik (Halifax, Nova Scotia). They work as a curator, expanded-media painter, and cultural worker. Garay is interested in contradictions that lead subjects, like them, into complicity and complacency. These materially manifest through paintings, ready-made objects, immersive installations and more. Their interest lies in the prismatic unseen contradictions and incommensurable situations while focusing on themes of fugitivity, time, and labor. Hauntology and melodrama under a queer necropolitical lens foregrounds their practice.
