C A N N O P Y
Art is True North
MOCA Spring 2025
Justin Ming Yong, Blur, installation view, MOCA Toronto, 2025
As Toronto’s Sterling Road evolves into a vibrant creative hub, its resident museum-cum-gallery space stays ahead of the curve with innovative exhibits
Words by Gus Lederman | Photography courtesy of MOCA
ISSUE 15 | TORONTO | SPACES
L: The Tower Automotive Building designed by John W. Woodman in collaboration with C.A.P Turner, 1920
R: MOCA Toronto Exterior. Photo: Gabriel Li
For the last seven years, Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) has been quietly thriving on Sterling Road, as a vivid artistic node at the center of what was once an industrial hub. These days, Sterling Road is a uniquely sensorial experience: from the gustatory delights of the chocolatey scents wafting from the resident Nestlé factory, to the staccato chatter of people grabbing a pint on the Henderson Brewing Company patio, before checking out the Sorauren Farmers’ Market. This stretch of town is slowly being revitalized from a relic of a manufacturing era, to a multipurpose and communal neighbourhood with commercial ambitions. At the heart of this burgeoning artery in Toronto’s west-end is MOCA’s residence, a former aluminum foundry which has recently been reopened as a mixed-use tower, containing office and exhibit spaces. With each new exhibit opening, the first three floors occupied by MOCA get a complete makeover. Extensive renovations welcome fresh batches of artists for seasonal runs. While Sterling Road is a long string of construction projects, MOCA’s interiors interrupt the monotony of steel and concrete with a wonderland of colour, texture, and unconventional integrations of art and architecture. Its interiors are variously outfitted with smooth fabrics and rough edges, bright shapes and muted landscapes─the mundane turns ethereal, and the fantastical turns tactile. For MOCA’s Spring 2025 exhibit, the distance between these contrasting states is expanded to maximum effect.
L-R: Jessica Stockholer, Justin Ming Yong, Margaux Williamson
This season’s lineup brings an eclectic set of works by Jessica Stockholder, Justin Ming Yong, and Margaux Williamson─plus an encore appearance of Alex Da Corte’s fan favourite exhibit from the fall, Ear Worm. Stockholder utilizes the majority of the first floor for her site-specific installation, The Squared Circle: Ringing, with a life-sized boxing ring as the focal point. The ring, like much of the exhibit, is striking in its colour pairings: the canvas is an unhemmed salmon-coloured fabric, while the ropes are a glossy yellow. Stockholder’s iconic use of unconventional materials is clear, with puzzle mats sticking out from underneath the salmon canvas, and, in a nearby piece, neon pink cords tangled with lightbulbs and lamp wires. No wall or tile goes unconsidered: bright shapes and poetic tidbits hide in plain sight, along the exhibit walls. The tessellation of triangles, including a formation of chopped-up wooden tables, appears to be a recurring motif. Entering this exhibit feels like interrupting a conversation: from structures, to vinyl stickers, to paintworks, to poems. The interactivity is palpable. Elements overlap, clash, and complement each other, drawing the viewer’s eyes in a loosely wandering zig-zag. Likewise, Stockholder’s set enters in conversation with the MOCA’s architecture. It becomes up to the visitor to decode this textural dialogue of static gestures.
CANNOPY x Jessica Stockholder
Jessica Stockholder, The Squared Circle Ringing, installation view, MOCA Toronto, 2025
You’re known for your use of unconventional materials: The Squared Circle: Ringing is fitted with lamps, bungee cords and sliced wooden tables. How does this relationship between convention and subversion inform you as an artist?
JS ─ Art history has for many decades included artists working with all kinds of materials: my work is in dialogue with that history, and with the world around me. I make things, or orchestrate moments, using all kinds of materials from the world that we are all moving around in, materials that were also made by other people. I don’t understand my work to be subversive, rather it is resonant with what we live with.
Jessica Stockholder, The Squared Circle Ringing, installation view, MOCA Toronto, 2025
Walking around the first floor, it became difficult to tell where the museum’s architecture ended, and your exhibition began. You’ve completely transformed the space, right up to the front desk. What is your process like for first getting familiar with, and then metamorphosing MOCA’s space?
JS ─ I orchestrate an experience that raises questions about frame, edge, boundary, and autonomy. This experience rattles with metaphor in relation to so many parts of life. The Squared Circle: Ringing is distinct from the space, and also inseparable from it. I thoroughly enjoyed placing the monitor with the shaking hydrangeas next to the air vent of similar proportions! The recorded wind and the real wind coming through the vent, in concert with one another.
Jessica Stockholder, The Squared Circle Ringing, installation view, MOCA Toronto, 2025
The image of the boxing ring, as well as some of the poetic works on the wall, refer to the space as a sort of stage for performance, transformation, and confrontation. To what degree is this confrontation, or invitation, intended?
JS ─ I hope that the work as a whole makes space to contemplate the complexity inherent in public dialogue of all kinds─art exhibition, politics, gaming, theater…. How we create unity and agreement in the midst of a cacophony of feeling, agreement, and disagreement.
Justin Ming Yong, Blur, installation view, MOCA Toronto, 2025
If you can draw your eyes away from Stockholder’s captivating installation, softness awaits on the other side of the room. Justin Ming Yong’s Blur is a practice in reimagined textiles, quilting his way across the walls, and around a massive wooden block suspended from the ceiling. What isn’t so obvious at first is that the work extends all the way into the elevators. Playing with the way elevators are fitted with drab fabrics to prevent damage when transporting large objects, Yong lines the elevator walls with gorgeous quilted geometry. The incorporation of the elevators in the exhibition speaks to MOCA’s dedication to total transformation, and their celebration of the transitory process. Yong calls on the traditional quilt-making knowledge passed down to him by his mother to create his nontraditional works. He doesn’t emphasize symmetry or exactitude in his shapes, instead letting purposeful imperfection bleed into the meticulous craft. The asymmetry of the patterns on the quilts draws the eye to the stitching, which mixes vertical and horizontal lines to create a veiled pattern of its own. The exhibit asks you to take your time admiring the three main pieces, more so than you can afford to do in the elevator, with only seconds between floors. The most eye-catching piece is the suspended block wrapped with overlapping quilts, in which softness and sharp edges provide pleasant contrast, as the cube’s angles are dulled by the fabric.
Alex Da Corte, Ear Worm, installation view, MOCA Toronto, 2024
The second floor opens up to reveal an uncanny air of nostalgia with Alex Da Corte’s Ear Worm, which isn’t a new addition to the gallery. The exhibit earned itself an extension from the Fall/Winter collection, when it first caught Cannopy’s eye. Ear Worm is a mixology of pop-culture, sexuality, violence, cinema, children’s literature, art and design history. His series of short films (Rubber Pencil Devil) and “Mouse Museum” invite the viewer into a nostalgic fever dream, that includes such scenes as Bugs Bunny reclining on a crescent moon, while Frank Ocean’s sultry “Moon River” croons over and over. “Mouse Museum” is a life size plywood tunnel which doubles as a cabinet of curiosity, offering frivolous glimpses into Da Corte’s collection of small toys and sculptures (that range from a deflated rubber sphere, to Harry Potter’s magic wand). Elsewhere, another screen exhibits Da Corte himself, morphed into Dopey—one of the seven dwarves—holding a fluorescent blue candle, as he saunters up a never ending staircase.
CANNOPY x Margaux Williamson
Margaux Williamson, Shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars, installation view, MOCA Toronto, 2025
The top floor of the MOCA exhibit space is reserved for the deeply contemplative family of pieces by artist Margaux Williamson, entitled Shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars. Walking through this exhibit evokes the feeling of exploring someone else’s house, appreciating all the little pieces and imprints of a life. Williamson depicts quotidian scenes: bedrooms, living rooms, rivers─all while bringing a fascination to the mundane. She abandons the rigidity of traditional perspective and blurs edges, leaving space for the audience to make out what lies beyond the scene of the painting. These obscured borders compliment the third floor nicely with the first, as a subtle theme of rough edges seems palpable. Williamson’s scenes are largely naturalistic and rural, often with a distinguished object placed in their midst. She has a pattern of placing laptops and other common gadgets in her paintings and, with her brushstrokes and muted tones, mangages to envelop unsightly technology with the surrounding rustic aesthetics.
Margaux Williamson, Shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars, installation view, MOCA Toronto, 2025
How did you arrive at this orientation towards technology as the disruptor, rather than the default and inescapable context of our daily lives?
MW ─ I don’t see plastic or laptops or phones as disruptors in these works. For these paintings, it has been best if I see everything around me equally, just all atoms: a flower no different than a piece of garbage, a phone no different than a dinner plate. It is my preference to take as much symbology away, so I can better see all the elements around me. Hopefully, then, people in front of the finished work can be present in the time and space of the work, and the space that they’re in, without being taken off on the task of puzzling out meaning.
Margaux Williamson, Shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars, installation view, MOCA Toronto, 2025
Your process is quite intriguing: apparently, you begin with one object, then paint the scene around it without planning it out. How did you arrive at this process? Presumably, you’ve tried more conventional processes of creation─what constrictions did they place on your creative outlet that this more improvisational approach resolves?
MW ─ I’ve always improvised and followed the work intuitively, as it is much more interesting and complex for me to be surprised by what I make. When I have seven or so paintings finished, then I think about where I’ve gotten to, like the paintings are studies. I work on my notes, which are a bit like poetic fragments, or accounting lists of understanding what I have made. Then I go back, with a bit more of an understanding or blueprint of where I am going and why I am going there, to make seven more—hopefully to be surprised a bit more, and so on.
I make paintings based on these notes. For instance, there are two in the exhibition—“Birds” and “White Blanket”—that had the same note. The note was about a space that was so empty that the main grounding weight was just from a blanket at the bottom. With one, I started with a mirror in the middle, and with the other, I started with a rug and a laptop in the middle. They are very different paintings, but they both have that emptiness and a blanket at the bottom, a counter-intuitive weight.
I don’t paint the most important thing at first. I just paint one thing I am feeling that day, and then another thing I am feeling the next day, and then another thing. It’s a pleasure moving slowly, not correcting anything, not laboring too much in the transitions, and letting the painting be what it is.
Margaux Williamson, Shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars, installation view, MOCA Toronto, 2025
Your works evoke a sense of tranquility, framing mundane, everyday views with soft, blurred edges. How does your studio space inspire these settings? Or rather, how do your paintings inspire a space you aspire to create within?
MW ─ I have always felt best in an empty studio. Somehow, alone in a studio, I feel more connected to the world, more present, the potential for depth right there. I think what I can see of these paintings, looking back now on so many, is that I have tried to bring that way I have in the studio to spaces outside the studio—no matter how mundane or how much trouble I had seeing them.
At first glance, the MOCA can seem inaccessible, both because of its location, and because of the various assumptions people may have about contemporary art being esoteric and academic. MOCA’s efforts to de-snobbify the space extend beyond these exhibits, as they offer free creative programming for all ages, with family-friendly Community Sundays (first Sunday of the month), and a weekly drop-in Art Hive on Monday nights. While the surrounding area of Sterling Road continues to evolve, it seems MOCA has already arrived at the destination to which this neighbourhood is heading.