Afterglow | 2026

Solo exhibition at ZALUCKY

“Spinning, spinning – eventually, the pirouette ends, the carousel stops. On the other side of delight, artist Emily Spooner presents the afterlife of spectacle. ZALUCKY is pleased to announce the artist’s first solo exhibition in Toronto, featuring a new series of paintings sculpted in oil and sand.

Muted by the fading palette of late summer, vibrant reds, oranges, and blues dissolve into weathered greys, mossy greens, and earthen browns on the richly textured surfaces. Suspended between exuberance and stillness, the paintings evoke the eerie sense of grief that settles in at the end of a performance or an amusement ride.

Throughout the exhibition, Spooner playfully recycles the theatrical imagery of ballet and carousel horses drawn from vintage dance catalogues and other print and digital ephemera. The artist is especially captivated by archival photographs that serve as the residues of performance, whose previously dynamic energy must be reconstructed through pose, costume, and staging.

The series demonstrates the painter’s performative capacity to breathe life into lapsed moments and locked bodies. She reanimates her subjects by collapsing the distinction between the organic and mechanical movements of the costumed figures, allowing their gestures to become the sites where charged emotional states are revealed. Afterglow unveils a liminal world where the spectacle is over but its emotional resonance lingers, inviting us into a space that is at once quietly alive, but already past.”

The artist gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts

Photo credits: ZALUCKY

Performance by Katie Adams-Gossage

The opening included a solo dance performance by Katie Adams-Gossage. Using spotlight and shadow, the performance evoked the exhibition’s meditations on theatrical approaches to emotional processing and self-expression.

Katie Adams-Gossage (she/her) is a dance artist from Montreal, currently performing, creating, and teaching in Toronto. She conceptualizes her choreographies as visual art that employs physicality as their medium. Hailed as “Contemporary dance meets performance art … Absolutely stunning!” (Jillian Robinson, Toronto Fringe Review Roundup), Katie creates visceral visuals that elicit emotional metaphor and highlight the politics of the body. Her creations have been presented by Nuit Blanche, SummerWorks, Fall for Dance North, Citadel + Compagnie, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, and she was recently nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore award for outstanding original choreography. Alongside her choreographic pursuits, Katie performs the work of many of Toronto’s most notable dance artists, and is a faculty member at Dance Arts Institute. She is thrilled to be collaborating with Emily Spooner on this brand-new work.

Photo credits: Em Moor