Ella Gonzales | Twofold

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Ella Gonzales, “Twofold,” 2024

(courtesy of the artist)

X (Ceiling)

In the earliest stages of life, many of us spend a great deal of time on our backs. This is the safest position for sleeping newborns. In the moments before and after rest, our fresh gazes fixed upon points above us. The ceiling is the utmost threshold of the room, which, for young souls, might as well be the universe. I imagine that it’s from this orientation that we develop our initial sense of space, gleaning our first lessons of spatial awareness through a repetitive, cumulative study of the threshold.

In early civilizations, ceilings were not only structural surfaces, but vessels of communication about the world and its order. Frescoes mirrored sociality or relayed sacred tales. Impermeable architectural boundaries, rigid surfaces possessing at once the potential for reflection and prophecy, projection and promise.

Coffered, dropped, suspended, coved, popcorn, beamed, barrelled.

Horizontal boundaries dividing the vertical plane.

A constituent of place with authority.

Ella Gonzales’ second solo exhibition, Twofold, is installed in two spaces at Unit 17. Her pictorial style amalgamates disparate interior vistas into a single field. Using spatial modeling software, she (re)constructs fragmented glimpses into several spaces where her family has dwelled throughout her life. Layering living rooms, bedrooms, stairs, and hallways, Gonzales creates impossible architectures that collapse the reality of phenomenological memory into pure surface. The psychic margins that underpin Gonzales’ variegated compositions at once play into and confound the architectural imperatives of the ceiling threshold. Broadly in conversation with minimal abstraction, her work examines and revises the pillars of spatial rendering. The result offers a substrate, or scaffold, onto which her viewer can project their own consciousness.

Y (Curtain)

The exhibition space I run in Toronto separates its back room with a large white curtain that covers a surface area of approximately nine by seven feet. Installing exhibitions in the back room requires a constant address of, and reckoning with, the curtain. A soft distortion of the white cube convention. As different artists cycle through the space, I am periodically reminded of the infinite ways that curtains alter space. Curtains are suspended, permeable boundaries that embellish a space with depth and dimension, soft furnishings that imply separation. Flexible horizons that establish here from elsewhere.

Drapes, skirts, cloaks, veils, canopies (calling us back to bed).

Vertical boundaries dividing the horizontal plane.

Absorbent witnesses to what we determine is private.

Twofold, Ella Gonzales' second solo exhibition, is installed at Unit 17 across two spaces. This body of work introduces a new series of soft forms — hand painted patterned fabrics suspended by bespoke sconces and frames. These objects spread Gonzales’ inquiry into spatial memory out into three dimensions, unraveling space and time rather than folding it. These works delve into personal experiences of being raised in a diasporic atmosphere, an immigrant context where home is packed and unpacked and domestic space functions as a microcosm.

While their palette is warm and inviting, the draped fabric is also inherently concealing and private. Deliberately blending aesthetics of the known and unknown, of the felt and the impossible, Gonzales’ drawn curtains assert a right to opacity, citing Martinican theorist and poet Édouard Glissant. In Twofold, the artist moves past the functional role textiles play in the delineation of interior space in the home, focusing instead on their narrative and symbolic potency. By wielding their liminality, she dissolves stable interpretations of space, time, and the attitudes we inherit. The Cartesian plane crashes, becoming supple suggestion.

Ella Gonzales is a Filipina Canadian artist working between painting and Computer-Aided Design programs. She has recently exhibited at Mercer Union, Toronto; grunt gallery, Vancouver; The Power Plant, Toronto; Unit 17, Vancouver; Galerie Nicolas Robert, Toronto; and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge. Gonzales holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Western University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Guelph.

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