As part of our celebrations around Pride Month, Canada Gallery’s Summer exhibition, Invisible Portraits, is a collaboration with Southampton City Art Gallery.
Invisible Portraits sheds light on diversity, bravery and forgotten figures from LGBTIQ+ history. Through a series of paintings, film and audio, this exhibition highlights the importance of equality, freedom, equity and social justice that echoes both Canada’s and the UK’s shared culture and civilisation.
The exhibition has been a highly personal journey for Lucy Ash, a British-Canadian artist whose work is concerned with creating visibility and shifting perception of the LGBTIQ+ community. She incorporates personal narrative with ideas of time, rhythm, and concealment to represent an emotional response to love, death, loss, and injustice.
Canada Gallery’s location has great poignancy for Invisible Portraits. The catalyst for this body of work was the tragic homophobic assault on Ian Baynham in Trafalgar Square, September 2009. Ian died from the injuries 18 days later. In addition, Canada Gallery’s proximity to Whitehall and the Cenotaph connects a series of artworks by Ash that focus on the challenge gay men faced during the First World War.
The Canada Gallery exhibition follows on from a collaboration between the artist and Southampton City Art Gallery between 2020–23, where Ash responded to works by LGBTIQ+ artists held in Southampton’s collection with a series of portraits that respond to their lives and stories.