Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn and Andrea Carlson on View at The Goldfarb Gallery

Toronto’s Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery launches our Spring/Summer program on Thursday, May 22, with an opening celebration of When Water Embraces Empty Space by Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn and A Painting is a Coin by Andrea Carlson. We are extremely honored to be presenting the work of these two internationally distinguished artists. 

Curated by Clara Halpern, Carlson’s solo exhibition showcases a complex gathering of artworks spanning painting, sculpture, drawing, video, and print. The show focuses on the artist’s prolific engagement with land, ancestral knowledge, cinema, and Indigenous Futurism(s) as she builds matrices of meaning that are personal, politically charged, and cosmologically expansive. Carlson is best known for her prismatic and multi-paneled works on paper, two of which are featured in A Painting is a Coin. Also included is a newly commissioned sculpture and a multi-screen video collaboration with Rozalinda Borcilă.

For Nguyễn’s first exhibition in Canada, curated by Jenifer Papararo, the gallery presents a focused collection of works that center around one object: the Luf canoe, a late nineteenth-century boat expropriated from the island of Luf in Papua New Guinea by a German trader. Through animation, song, and documentary, this multi-channel video installation and selection of objects reveals the conflicting history of the canoe’s journey through the voices of three descendants of the original craftspeople of the boat. When Water Embraces Empty Space is a material exposure of what was and an ethereal re-imagination of what should be. This exhibition is commissioned by Haus for Media Arts Oldenberg, Germany, in partnership with the Showroom in London and The Goldfarb Gallery with funding from the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Federal Government and Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

Both exhibitions run from May 23 to August 2, 2025. 

To learn more, visit thegoldfarbgallery.ca.