Worlds World Worlds
Elyse Longair, Rise. Again. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Elyse Longair
Main Space
June 9–August 29, 2026
Worlds World Worlds takes its title and conceptual grounding from Donna Haraway’s phrase “it matters what worlds world worlds,” and responds to Union Gallery’s curatorial theme, living together, by focusing on collaboration, coexistence, and solidarity in times of intersecting crises. Through collage, the exhibition aims to explore how images construct our understanding of reality, and how shifting those images might shift perception itself.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My collages begin by hand through sourcing, cutting, and reimagining popular knowledge source material. This requires time spent studying what images are and searching for possible relationships to re-imagine beyond the realities and meanings of the ‘original’. At the most basic, I see an image as a representation that points to the world in some manner, which for me is important because images do not simply re-present ‘the real’ but, especially in contemporary culture, they create our sense of reality. In other words, images are carefully curated pauses in time, capturing specific edited visions of history and reality. My interest is what could exist beyond that moment, outside the frame of the image
I explore this through collage by expanding images’ frames through overlap, placing images side by side, or editing them down through cropping. Rather than physically gluing fragments together, I unify them through scanning and print them at a large scale for exhibition. Even though I am reimagining each image, they always bring a trace, a relationship to the context of the world from which they were taken from. To me, that’s a beautiful thing.
It is important to me that the worlds I build are strange enough and yet still have a glimmer of possibility that the viewer wants to adventure into them – in a similar way to what a good science fiction film does. One of the key qualities of my practice is to present open-ended images that allow viewers to imagine multiple possibilities and actively experience alternate futures. My aim is to build worlds and futures through collage, for the viewer to enter, specifically by leaving room for imagination.
To learn more, see my interview by curator Naomi Potter here.
Elyse Longair is an artist, curator, and image theorist currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University. She serves as chair for the Services to Artists Committee for The College Arts Association. Longair’s research focuses on collage history, collage as research creation and institutional strategies of collecting and curating collage. Among recent awards, she studied collage in Paris at The Centre Pompidou thanks to the David Edney Research Award and was awarded Exposure Emerging Photographer of the Year Award by Exposure Photography Festival earning her a solo exhibition at Contemporary Calgary. Her Infrathin Image Theory in collage examines artists who use a flat seamless aesthetic where the thin space or gap between image fragments becomes less and less, nearly invisible. In this thin, infrathin space, the viewer can imagine freely the possibility of the image, and the roles of picture making and imagination.