upcoming
Collette Broeders, Elaine Carr, Dennis Hunkler, Ed Janzen, Karl Jirgens
5 Solitudes
June 26–August 8, 2026
Sylvie Bélanger & Edith and Gerald Jackson Galleries
Opening Reception: June 26, 7–10pm
Talk on Visual Poetics by Karl Jirgens: July 11, 2pm
Communities of Solitude participatory project led by Elaine Carr: TBD
Additional ancillary programming TBA
Janzen+Broeders will perform Dialogue: Nomadic Notes, a series of unannounced public interventions throughout the exhibition.
5 Solitudes is a multimedia installation of digital images, drawing, performance, sculpture, and video, exploring isolation. Remote locations are referenced with liminal and intimate spaces utilizing varying modes. These works weave tracings of visual narratives and create dialogues involving viewers and environments.
Each configuration of drawings, images, and video is unique to the notion of isolation: Ed Janzen manipulates a section of wood and tests its biological nature; Dennis Hunkler uses a human face within an inhuman frame; Collette Broeders features an experience of solitude through paper peepshows and stereoscopic views; Janzen+Broeders perform in locations throughout the city challenging ideas of isolation prevalent in urban spaces; Elaine Carr focuses on the process of walking which morphs into a daily drawing practice of solitude; Karl Jirgens takes individual pixels signifying isolation.
“I began this project in spring 2020, and as I painted through the pandemic, ideas about the home felt increasingly fraught. I felt weighted down by absence, I felt the fragility of an uncertain future and the spectre of death. I chose images that reflected this preoccupation with presence and absence. I loved the image of peonies, whose flowers are so splendidly large they can't hold themselves up. They flop over, splay in theatrical despair across adjacent lawns and sidewalks. When I walked through my neighbourhood the peonies recalled me, with a touch of levity, to the messaging of 17th century vanitas: beautiful, but only for a moment; remember your death.
Paintings often live in homes as decor, and the practice of painting has a complicated relationship with that. The aims of decorating, which paintings in homes are chosen to serve, may be at odds with our aims as contemporary artists. But decorating is important. It's a broadly accessible vernacular aesthetic practice that can provide a sense of identification with one's space, an expression of group belonging, maybe even pleasure and delight. Living with Peony Room is an effort to investigate these dynamics. What's it like to live in a painted house? Is it possible to collapse the categories 'art space' and 'living space' to a meaningful degree? Can we (playfully) chase (some kind of) utopia by living with art? This exhibition is intended as documentation of the project: the paintings and the time spent living with them.”
Collette Broeders is a passionate mixed media artist merging traditional processes with new media and performance. She has a combined education in business, accounting, and visual arts from St. Clair College of Applied Arts and Technology and the University of Windsor. She has exhibited nationally and internationally. Selected performance, solo, and group exhibitions include: Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (California); IndexG (Ontario); Whitdel Gallery (Michigan); Calvin College (Michigan); Thames Art Gallery (Ontario); Crane Museum of Papermaking (Massachusetts); Devos Center (Michigan); University of Michigan gallery; Work • Detroit (Michigan); Art Gallery of Windsor (Ontario); Niagara Artist Centre (Ontario); Amateras Foundation (Bulgaria); Artcite Inc. (Ontario); Studio Faire (France); and Woman Made Gallery (Illinois). Her most recent work includes performance and installation at Art Windsor-Essex (Ontario).
Elaine Carr Elaine Carr is an interdisciplinary artist born in Scotland, living and working in Windsor, Ontario. She creates perspectives of land, water, space and memory and considers the effects of human activity on the earth, with particular emphasis on water. Her mixed media works include drawing, photography, relief sculpture and installation, piecing together fragments from the present and the past, from historical and geographical data, cartography, photographic data and memory. Environmental and social justice have long been a focus in Elaine's work. She has presented papers and led workshops at the Arts for Social and Environmental Justice Symposium in Toronto, the Social Justice Conference at the University of Windsor, the Art Gallery of Windsor, and at the Nordic Association for Canadian Studies, University of Turku, Finland. She holds an MA in Culture and Spirituality, Holy Names University, Oakland, California; BFA, Visual Art, University of Windsor; BA Honours History; BEd, Western University.
Dennis Hunkler (New School of Art, Toronto, Canada 1965-69; San Francisco Art Institute, B.F.A. 1972). Exhibitions: Purging the Anomalies, Paintings and Drawings, Arts Council Windsor and Region, Windsor, Ontario, 2025; Stanzas: Concrete is Porous, Victoria Arts Council, Victoria, BC, 2020. Architecture and Poetry: Plan into Elevation, Arthur Secunda Museum at Cleary University, Howell, Michigan, 2019. Biographies: Who’s Who in American Art, 1976-present, R.R. Bowker Company, New York, NY; Dictionary of International Biography, Volume 16, International Biographical Centre, Cambridge, England. Collections: City of Toronto Archives, Toronto, Canada; Museu De Arte Contemporanea International, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil; Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, California; Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark; Franklin Furnace Archives at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY.
Ed Janzen is a Windsor, ON based artist whose practice utilizes digital media, drawing, performance, installation, printmaking, fire sculpture, and sound. His Ambient Walks have taken place in Canada, US, Cuba, Portugal, Spain, and Mexico. Selected exhibitions include: Nuit Blanche Toronto, Art Windsor Essex, Thames Gallery (ON), PAVED (Saskatoon), Gallery Project (Ann Arbor), CAID (Detroit), Artcite Inc (Windsor), and Hamilton Artists Inc. His experimental videos have screened at six Media City Film Festivals (Windsor), Festival International Du Film Sur L'Art (Montreal), Sphere (India), Kassel Dokfest (Germany), Antimatter (BC), Onion City (Chicago), Australian Film Festival (Melbourne), and Basement Media Fest (Brooklyn/Boston). A collection of his videos are distributed by Canadian Film Makers Distribution Center. He was co-founder and participating artist for two fire sculpture artist collectives: Control Burn, Windsor, 2002-2011, and the IgniteArt Collective Sioux Lookout ON in 2017, as well as Scratch 'n Sniff, a writers and artists collective in Windsor, 1993-98. He is a musician, singer-songwriter who performs solo and with two roots-influenced bands, Dead Waits, and The Unscene. He holds a BFA in Visual Art and a Computer Science degree from the University of Windsor.
Janzen+Broeders (Ed Janzen and Collette Broeders) have been collaborating since 2020, producing performative drawings and video work in public and private spaces throughout various communities. Their ongoing project Dialogue, Parts 1 through 5 has been presented and performed at Common Ground Gallery in Windsor and Cedar Ridge Gallery in Toronto. Dialogue No.8, an installation and 7-part performance, was exhibited at Art Windsor Essex in 2024. Public interventions of Dialogue have occurred in Conservation Halton parks, along pathways, on Pelee Island in an abandoned quarry and barn, and inside tunnels and walkways throughout Windsor, Ontario.
Karl Jirgens, former English Deptartment Head and former Chair of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Windsor, is author of six books (Coach House, Mercury, ECW, The Porcupine’s Quill, and Exile Editions). Jirgens edited two books (on painter, Jack Bush, and poet, Christopher Dewdney) plus, an issue of Open Letter magazine with Beatriz Hausner. His scholarly and creative texts are published globally (recently in Japan). His poetry was selected for Best Poetry of Canada, 2023. His prize winning short-fiction collection, The Razor’s Edge was published in 2022. His latest book is Travesties (Exile, 2025, poetry). Jirgens founded, edited, and published Rampike magazine, featuring celebrated international artists, writers, and theorists, including: Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Paul Auster, William Burroughs, Clarice Lispector, Robert Lepage, Daphne Odjig, Norval Morrisseau, Ron Baird, Dennis Oppenheim, Ian Baxter&, Janet Cardiff, and Chris Burden, among others. Rampike is print archived at Thomas Fisher Library (University of Toronto) and digitally archived at Leddy Library (University of Windsor).
Images:
1. Collette Broeders, Paper Peepshow No. 2, 2024, laser photographs, acrylic on paper, board, cloth.
2. Elaine Carr, Dwelling 2, 2022, graphite, ink, colour pencil, conte on toned paper.
3. Dennis Hunkler, PUSHING THE LIMITS, Left (down), 2025, wood, aluminum, plastic.
4. Elaine Carr, Trace Narratives, 2019, mixed media on wood panel.
5. Janzen+Broeders, Dialogue No. 9, September 28, 2025, performative intervention in a pedestrian tunnel, LaSalle, ON.
6. Ed Janzen, Untitled (a section of tree stretched the equivalent of one additional years growth), 2025.
7. Ed Janzen, Untitled (a section of tree stretched the equivalent of one additional years growth) (detail), 2025.
8. Karl Jirgens, Pixelated, 2025, digital print.
9. Karl Jirgens, Pixelated (detail), 2025, digital print.