It’s Still Life is Michael Dumontier’s fourth solo show with the gallery. The show refines earlier concerns into a treatise on lives and objects made still. Many of these objects—a white cane, wooden slippers, a hinged figure in dejected repose—suggest abstracted moments in a life winding down. The classic motif of the floral still life is re-imagined with bent coat hangers, fabric, and eyelet, inferring a state of arrested development. Three pine planks are hinged and hung with eyeglasses to suggest the humblest of totems. The works occupy a quiet space, replete with tangles of nuance and puzzling queries. Contrasting strong sculptural elements and materials with emblems of fragility, the works present a series of dichotomies between materiality and invisibility, embodiment and absence, stasis and change.

Michael Dumontier co-founded The Royal Art Lodge collective in 1996 and continued as a member until 2008, along with Marcel Dzama and Neil Farber. Solo presentations for the Royal Art Lodge have been held at the Liverpool Biennial; the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Drawing Center, New York; and The Power Plant, Toronto. Dumontier maintains a collaborative practice with Neil Farber, meeting every Wednesday evening to collaborate on paintings, drawings, and writing. In 2014, the two were shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award. Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber have exhibited at Plug In ICA, Winnipeg; Salon du Dessin Contemporain, Paris; Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal; and the Hole, New York. Work by Michael Dumontier can be found in numerous private and public collections including the Vancouver Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Canada, and solo exhibitions for the artist have been held in New York, Padua (Italy), Boston, Winnipeg, and Montréal.