En Flux, the summer group exhibition at TIAN Contemporain gallery in Montreal, Quebec, proposes transcending beyond the immediacy of the gaze for a prolonged contemplation. Featured on the gallery’s main floor, where its angled layout guides viewers' path in circles around Robin Crofut-Brittingham’s immense, lush utopia The Nowhere Place, the exhibition succeeds in its mission to transfix viewers by offering glimpses into intricate, stirring, and ethereal worlds. The walls of the gallery feature a harmony of material compositions such as Jeanette Johns’ woven and printed Plain Hunt on Four series, Roxane Fiore’s pastel compositions Outside Looking Out and Outside Looking In, and Sarah Bertrand-Hamel’s Transcription B. The pieces are dynamic and rhythmic, elicited from both pattern and a distinct lack of pattern in the form of organically abstract shapes that stretch beyond the confines of their frames. Each piece is a layered window into liminal worlds that drip with a sense of desire on the precipitate of consequences, much like watching the sunset on a humid summer evening - beauty complicated by the haze of wildfire smoke in the air and the heat of summers never again to be experienced.

The exhibition is intriguing in how the works negotiate themes such as control/entropy, the constructed/organic, abundance/scarcity, and the secular/divine. Fiore’s Inside Looking Out and Outside Looking In, Tompkins’ Devil’s Advocate, and Crofut-Brittingham’s The Nowhere Place and Seeking Safe Harbour I paint compositions that are dreamy and dizzyingly divine, yet unsettling. These abstract and deceptively bright terrains blur reality, lulling viewers beyond the veil of consciousness into complex and layered inner worlds. In a similar vein, Bertrand-Hamel’s Instant 6722 and Transcription III, Johns’ Hunt on the Floor - 2143, (weaving), and 2413, and Yen-Chao Lin’s lucidité des sens I are sculptural works defined by their technical rigidity and repetition. Their construction signals something automatic, mechanical, and utilitarian. Yet, these pieces bleed organic with tactile intimacy and human touch. This push and pull sways the viewer into intuitive worlds that dispute conformity and external perception.

The small space of the gallery at times makes you wish you had more of a palette cleanser before moving onto the next piece but ultimately works in the exhibition’s favour, keeping you immersed and able to circle back to that one piece that “you just need to get a better look at”. Together, En Flux presents windows into delectable, hidden worlds that emerge from intricate and meticulously crafted pieces - like Where’s Waldo for people who can rotate apples in their mind.