January 24 to February 21, 2026
With MATERIAL CONDUCT, Scholes continues the investigations introduced in his 2021 solo Sightlines at the gallery, followed by a 2022 exhibition at the McClure Gallery, a 2024 feature at Musée-Pointe-à-Callière, and a major presentation at Montreal’s contemporary art fair Plural last year. The exhibition explores our complex relationship with ephemeral objects and the politics and labour embedded in cycles of waste. Through photography, performance, and provisional sculptural forms, Scholes transforms sites of deterioration into spaces of attention rather than residue.
The series Terrible Beauties presents abandoned materials as intimate photographic portraits, while the Wanderingsproject, including photography, video, and performance, introduces the recurring figure of the Rubbish Picker navigating accumulations of refuse as both witness and participant. Rudimentary, fragile, and time-bound, the beeswax structures highlight entropy as an active condition, emphasizing the cyclical conduct of materials, objects, and labour.
Scholes invites us to confront what we often overlook and the quiet operations that sustain the objects and systems we rely upon. His works insist that material is never inert and always carries traces of use, care, and decay, with cycles of making and unmaking inseparable from our shared realities.
MATERIAL CONDUCT ponders how what we cast aside reflects what we value, ignore, or take for granted, illuminating the subtle ironies, paradoxes, and quiet condescensions woven into acts of disposal.
Photograph on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 paper. 20″x 30″
