Connie Wilson
“The Language”

April 11 - May 23, 2026

Checklist

Chris Andrews is pleased to present Connie Wilson’s second solo exhibition with the gallery titled, “The Language.” The exhibition is composed of two new series of sculptures.

In the front room of the gallery are a suite of cabinet wall sculptures. Assemblages constructed from accumulated layers of material (plastics, vinyl, vellum, found objects, natural specimens) sit inside something resembling display cases for oversized figurines. The slim rectangular cabinets, hung just lower than eye-level, recall a scene from a laboratory or pathetic cloning operation. Reflective sheets of glass project a bent viewer’s silhouette back at themselves.

In each of the five sculptures an exquisite corpse is pieced together from folded vellum rectangles that roughly section a body. Taking reference from 1920s menswear catalogue illustrations, Wilson has etched elongated torsos clad in formal wear into the stacked vellum forms. Improvised heads sit behind reliefs in the uppermost portion, represented by knotty growths collected from tree branches, or in another, a miniature outfit for a toy figurine still in its original retail packaging.

The materials come to occupy a space between mid-century industrial optimism and where it perverts. Wilson highlights plastic’s contradictions: at once recalling the material’s utopic promises across the fields of fabrication and engineering, and the equally present consequences in its applications.

In the gallery’s back room, cast forms derived from computer generated drawings made by the artist sit atop corseted hardboard structures, and draw reference to canonical forms from 19th century engineering such as the water tower or the incandescent lightbulb. The series’s title, Canadian Sculpture (I-III), engages the relationship between nationalistic sentiment and petroleum’s international trade. The flow of oil and its effects on trade agreements is a recurring theme throughout Wilson’s practice, and here she deals directly with its by-products.

Connie Wilson (b. 1993, Belfast, Northern Ireland) received a BFA from NSCAD University in 2016 and an MFA from the University of Guelph in 2021. Recent exhibitions include Therapy Press, Vienna (2025); dacodac, Zürich (2024); Chris Andrews, Montreal (2024); Pumice Raft, Toronto (2023); and Franz Kaka, Toronto (2022).