Shift n’ Wiggle

Tiziana La Melia, Kim Neudorf, Vito Park, Majd Shammas, Chukwudubem Ukaigwe

October 24 - November 23, 2025

Curated by Amanda Boulos

Opening Reception:
Friday, October 24, 2025
6-9pm

During my undergraduate studies at York University in the early 2010s, painting was not seen as a relevant contemporary medium. I was often advised that as a BIPOC woman, I should concentrate on something more austere—something that could centre my identity and foreground my racial experience better. My professors repeatedly directed me to Mona Hatoum's installation practice. Was it so hard to believe that I wanted to be in dialogue with Jack Bush, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Kenneth Noland, and Josef Albers, whose work was stored just across the hall? Maybe everyone thought painting lacked the semantic weight necessary to pin down diasporic Middle Eastern reference points. Or perhaps they viewed painting primarily as a market-driven medium whose only purpose was to sustain the arts economy, with little room to engage politically.

Fortunately, I never bent to my professors’ beliefs. Instead, their lack of faith radicalized me. I found meaning in pursuing a moribund discipline, one that was deemed inappropriate for bodies like mine.

About 7 years ago, every cool artist and their dog embraced painting as their main medium. They spanned the full spectrum of racial and ethnic identities (white folks included!), and they all asserted that their work emerged from and contributed to their diverse cultural backgrounds…. With painting’s restoration of cultural prominence, my sense of radicalism dissipated (I mourned my radical self by changing my IG name from RadicalMandyDandy to amooboo).  

Recently, though, my radicalism has sparked back up again. I’ve noticed that the cool artists might have moved on from the painted image…. Am I witnessing a cyclical return to painting’s obsolescence or lack? Has it been supplanted by more austere mediums and materials? Evidence suggests this transition may already be underway. There’s a mounting pressure to show more than just paint on a two-dimensional surface. Painters feel like they need to expand beyond the painted image—make their paintings shift n’ wiggle in ways that surprise. Maybe they embed jewellery or hardware in subtle ways, integrate traditional craft or alternative ‘poor’ materials, or add elaborate, delicate handmade frames. These treatments can be found in the paintings themselves or integrated somehow in the exhibition space. I have seen exhibition after exhibition with a couple of curious non-paintings sitting patiently in the corner for the viewer to peruse. They give the viewer a wink, perhaps a firm handshake, but never the full conversation the paintings provide.

The five painters in this exhibition—Tiziana, Chukwudubem, Vito, Kim, and Majd—untangle the pressure to do more that plagues painters. Their specialty is maintaining the importance of the image, even as they shift n’ wiggle out of the four corners of the painting. Their approaches are all so different, and they’re all fucking mind-blowing.

Chukwudubem, a painter showing a painter’s video, uses a camera tied to barbing clippers to shake the image as if it were made using a long-stem brush. The images in “Shivering” are reminiscent of the most expressive, painterly line work of Edvard Munch and Francis Bacon. The video’s black bodies sit against a plain background for clarity, yet you can’t make out the details. Instead, the figures hold you in an endless alla prima session, where the image is painted and painted again. The work sends you into a dizzy spell, questioning whether we can actually see black bodies as they are.

Vito is devoted in his pursuit of the perfect sound, whether playing interpretations of classical piano or fabricating fire-painted gongs. Each produces a unique sound in accordance with the image painted on it. How does it make an image speak so well? It materialises a refined human touch infused with the core artist’s elements of shape, form, colour, and line. Vito’s gongs are to be experienced with the whole body in space, not just with the cones and rods that live in the back of your eyes.

Tiziana is the free spirit I aspire to be. She works for no one but the fullest, wildest world. Images and words become greasy and firm in the mouths and eyes she touches. Tiziana’s pace and practice surprise at every turn, even in her email interactions about this exhibition (It turns out we both like lentils and almost shared a first name.) Tiziana is the pure form of the show’s intention: to expand painting, to expand everything she touches unapologetically. Her practice is mouse-shaped balloon that keeps stretching to fill an endless mouse tunnel.

Majd’s painting practice comes with a breath of fresh air. He doesn’t care what you think, and he hides nothing. He views the dirty world with a voracious and haunting imagination. Every drop of mess is felt, and every ideal fully depleted, in his expanding, layered-all-over gestural paintings. Majd brings me home, where sun burns when you’re out too long, and you grow hungry when there’s no bow around for hunting. His paintings are a locus of vulnerability and humanity.

Kim rends, scribes, marks, scores his images, blackens and illuminates, exposes the bones, skeletons, muscles, and sinews of painting to the brain. Kim is the scientist of painters’ images, expanding them in ways that feel molecular—slicing strands of pigment to add, remove, or alter their genes. The images land on a flat surface with four corners, but their impact contaminates your insides.

Now go see the show and experience what only painters can do.