Relational Capital
Work in progress by Bree Rappaport, mixed media, 2025. Photo courtesy of UG staff.
Bree Rappaport, Caryn Wei Ya Xie, Nathan Zhe, Sophia Herrington
Project Room
September 2–October 11, 2025
Reception: Thursday, September 18, 4:30-6:30pm
This exhibition is a culmination of the Stronger Together Collaborative Residency, which brought together four Union Gallery members to create new work and respond to our annual curatorial theme: in this economy?!
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Relational capital is traditionally defined within business discourse as one of the three pillars of intellectual capital, describing the value created through a company’s relationships with customers, vendors, and external partners. In this context, it refers to the systems, knowledge, and resources generated through networks of exchange. In Relational Capital, however, four artists reclaim and reimagine this term, shifting it away from corporate and financial frameworks toward an exploration of human connection, community, and care.
The four artists worked together during Union Gallery’s Stronger Together Collaborative Residency, from May 27 to August 9, 2025. They responded to this year’s curatorial theme, in this economy?!, and questioned: What forms of value, kinship, and resilience emerge when economic logics are disrupted? How do our relationships—to each other, to our communities, and to the natural world—help us navigate precarity, overcome crisis, and establish opportunities to thrive and grow? Over the course of the residency, themes of protection, luck, consumerism, health, care, chaos, and audience participation guided their process. From these dialogues emerged two interconnected installations, each articulating a different perspective on how to be creative and productive in this economy.
On the Feature Wall, Caryn Wei Ya Xie and Sophia Herrington approach these questions through the visual language of advertising. Transforming the wall into a large-scale billboard, they subvert the glossy seduction of commercial posters. Rather than selling products, their prints circulate affirmations, encouragement, and collective well-being. Drawing on the mass-distributive aesthetics of consumer culture, they reorient marketing’s visual codes toward messages of solidarity, healing, and kinship. Layered over the prints are painted words borrowed from both artistic and communal practices—Bind, Collate, Gather, Mesh, Collect—terms that reference not only the process of making art but also the act of people coming together. Caryn’s bold colour palette, inspired by the digital space and the Internet's visual language as well as the vibrancy of Chinatown advertisements, underscores the importance of synergy and collaboration, echoing the collective spirit that shaped the residency itself.
For Sophia, who recently graduated from Queen’s University’s BFA program, the residency marked a turning point. She entered with a desire to explore how to sustain artistic practice beyond the academy, in a context where materials and equipment are increasingly unaffordable. Through the residency, she discovered the more accessible gelatin plate printing technique, an affordable alternative to traditional printmaking that allowed her to continue her artistic growth in this economy. Together, she and Caryn reimagine the billboard not as a space of consumption but one of care, support, and possibility.
While Caryn and Sophia engage with the languages of advertising, Bree Rappaport turns inward to redefine the notion of productivity, and our relationship to money. Her installation suggests value in commodities beyond monetary terms, proposing alternative measures rooted in resilience, survival, and growth. Fractured glass and mirrors become metaphors for the cracks in our socio-economic and political systems, while projected light refracts across the space, evoking the feeling of walking through the woods and the diffuse light through vegetation. Bree’s experience as a tree planter in burned forests deeply informs her practice: “I am inspired by the resilience of a forest after fire. Reforesting and witnessing native plants return has given me solace. I witnessed the stages of regrowth and what may thrive after precarity, destruction.” Here, brokenness is not only a wound, but a site of renewal, where resilience mirrors the cycles of nature. Visitors are invited to slow down, sit, and take part in the work by sculpting a snail from plasticine and adding it to the installation—inside the Project Room or outside on the Feature Wall—becoming active collaborators in a living ecology of care.
Nathan Zhe bridges these works through sound and augmented experience. Inspired by the residency’s discussions and the artistic explorations of his peers, he has created a soundscape drawn from the language of news reports, particularly those covering forest fires. The composition layers themes of ecology, advertising, and social relations, weaving the artworks into a shared sonic environment. Nathan also developed an augmented reality component that allows visitors to engage more deeply with both installations, extending their sensory and conceptual reach. He created a scene of a burned forest and mapped it to the same size as the Project Room. A visitor may scan the Snapchat code on the wall, point their phone camera to the Project Room, and they will see the AR piece on their screen. This enhances the visualization within Bree’s work, providing additional background knowledge. Nathan's collaboration with Bree further amplifies the interplay of sound and light, enhancing the immersive feeling of moving through a natural landscape.
— Faten Nastas Mitwasi, Curator
MEET THE ARTISTS
Bree is a multidisciplinary artist and educator. She lives in Kingston. For the past three years she has been exploring different modes of employment. Trade work, electrical, and bush work in forestry. Art has been the grounding mechanism through change and instability.
Caryn Wei Ya Xie (b. 2002) is a visual artist and educator. By appropriating digital aesthetics to reimagine her documented lived experiences, Xie’s interventions translate a personal history of immigration into a broader conversation on the diasporic experience of fragmented identity and memory. Xie received a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from Queen’s University in 2024, where she was the recipient of the Liu Shiming Scholarship and Medal of Visual Art. She is currently working towards her Bachelor of Education.
Nathan Zhe (He/Him) is a Chinese multidisciplinary artist, producer, director, marketing director and photographer based in Canada and China. He's in his fourth year of Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Media and Performance Productions specialization. With a strong foundation and passion in producing, directing, marketing and arts administration, Nathan has worked extensively behind the scenes of film and theatre productions, coordinating teams and ensuring creative visions are brought to life.
Sophia’s art draws on nature’s themes of growth, transformation, and interconnectedness. Using traditional printmaking methods like lithography and silkscreen, she creates layered works that reflect the fragile yet resilient ties between humans and nature. Symbols like roots and leaves explore these connections, while her careful process mirrors life’s cycles. Her work tells stories about how the environment shapes us, how we shape it, and inviting viewers to reflect on the visible and invisible threads that link all living things.