GENRE: VISUAL ART
To celebrate the closing of this year’s Rendezvous with Madness Festival Visual Arts Exhibition, Community Conversations, we are hosting a closing party in the gallery space on Sunday, November 8th from 2-4 PM.
At this event, you’ll have the opportunity to see how the exhibition has come together over two weeks of collective collaboration.
Part of GAS Collective’s ongoing Conversations series, this project builds on their shared interests in materiality, process-based practice, community building, and sustainable curatorial cycles. In collaboration with the artists Michelle Peraza and Seden Lai, the project explores how working with materials embodies the complexities of how we care and connect as communities in our current world.
Peraza and Lai both carefully process and push the limits of their materials: Peraza hand-transforms materials such as ashes and marigold into paints while reflecting on their colonial histories and connection to her identity, while Lai subverts the materiality of paper, metal, and found objects, challenging perceived notions of strength and permanence.
Together, the artists bring these inquiries into materiality and care into the gallery through a site specific mural and handcrafted sculptures. Looking into the sun, the moon, the stars, and the cardinal directions, the conventional ‘white-cube’ gallery is transformed into an open, process-driven studio. Visitors are invited into alternate cosmologies where they can carefully attend to their surroundings, reorient themselves, and reflect on what it means to care and build reciprocal relationships among communities.
32 Lisgar Street, 2nd Floor, Room 12
Toronto, Ontario
No Reservations Required.
Wheelchair Accessible Venue
Michelle Peraza is a visual artist of Cuban and Costa Rican descent. She holds a BA from Western University; BFA from OCAD University; and MFA from York University. Peraza has completed residencies at Mauser EcoHouse (Costa Rica), Vermont Studio Centre (United States), Arquetopia (Mexico), Art Gallery of Ontario (Canada), Sustainable Colour Lab Summer Institute at OCAD University (Canada), and Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts (Mnisiing/Toronto Islands Canada). She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards and has exhibited in public and artist-run galleries including Maison de la Culture Claude-Léveillée, Niagara Artists Centre, Cambridge Art Galleries, Sur Gallery, TAP Centre for Creativity, Guelph Civic Museum and upcoming at Tom Thomson Gallery and Neutral Ground. She teaches in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University and works and lives in Toronto/Tkaronto.
Seden Lai is an artist and designer based in Toronto. Integrating foraged previously discarded objects with materials like paper, metal, and fabric, she responds instinctively to material fragments embedded in the everyday. Her practice embraces the messages that may be hidden within the mundane; tracing connections between singular moments and cyclical returns.
She has exhibited work at Craft Ontario (2026), The Artist Project (2026), Xpace Cultural Centre (2025), and Toronto Interior Design Show (2024). She has also featured work and facilitated workshops in artist-run spaces such as G___rage (2026), home.office (2026), the Plumb (2026), Hearth Gallery (2025), 24hr ATM Lotto (2025), Unit 270 at Chinatown Centre 文華中心 (2025), and Whippersnapper (2023).
Seden’s Workshop is her studio practice dedicated to exploring paper as a living material in constant motion – through structure, form, and process.
GAS Collective is a curatorial collective formed in 2024, focusing on collaborative ways of knowledge-sharing, diasporic relations, circular curatorial models, and ecological balance and tension. Active members Gizem Candan and Steffi Sin Tung Ng came together during their MFA studies in the Criticism and Curatorial Practice program at OCAD University, connected by their identity as women of colour working in the arts.
Their work has been exhibited at Xpace Cultural Centre (2024) and Onsite Gallery (2026). They are the recipients of the Delaney Family Emerging Curator’s Prize (2026) and serve as the Curators-in-Residence at NAMARA | projects. They are currently working on their first publication, Material Conversations, which will be launched in the Fall of 2026.
Community Conversations
Curated by GAS Collective (Gizem Candan and Steffi Sin Tung Ng), Community Conversations considers materials as entry points to explore the definition, practice and meaning of care. Part of the collective’s ongoing Conversations series, this project builds on their shared interests in materiality, process-based practice, community building, and sustainable curatorial cycles.
