Solo fine art photography exhibition
at The Cardinal Gallery located at 1231 Davenport Road, Toronto
March 21-May 17, 2026.
OPENING NIGHT RECEPTION WITH ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE:
SATURDAY, MARCH 21, 2026
6:00-9:00pm
Visit www.thecardinalgallery.ca to sign up
The sky does not bend. It stretches above everything—unchanging, distant, sometimes heavy with its stillness.
As a child growing up during the Iran-Iraq war, and later as a refugee in Greece, the world beneath that sky was constantly shifting. Cities changed. Languages folded into one another. Familiar things disappeared, and new ones appeared without warning.
Under a sky that did not move, imagination became a way to live inside many worlds at once.
Some of this work returns to those early fragments of memory. Folding Patterns emerges from a small ritual during our refugee years in Athens. I gathered cardboard from the streets, and sometimes my Mother and I found paper sewing patterns which she used to make shirts for my father. Those patterns were always spread across the table—quiet, precise, and patient.
Decades later, photographing their folds and textures became a way of tracing migration through small material traces: cardboard, fabric, creases, and time. They are modest records of movement and survival.
Other images move into a more dreamlike terrain. Ghostly figures appear as echoes of memory—presences that feel both distant and close.
Animals drift through these landscapes as quiet symbols. A crane glides through time, suggesting continuity and eternity. A crow embodies the intelligence of adaptation, learning how to survive and remake its world again and again. Owls watch silently at the edges of perception.
Together these figures inhabit a space between memory and imagination.
The sky may not bend. But the worlds beneath it fold, fracture, merge, echo out and open—allowing infinite possibilities to coexist across loss, discovery, delight, and wonder.
-Photography Osheen Harruthoonyan
