Drawing from Algonquin Anishinaabe teachings and a lineage of blacksmiths and labourers, through to herself as an artist, King’s paintings explore work as continuing survival across worlds – and as the creation of new ones through making and building: the forge as studio, the body as tool, and fire as teacher.
Across symbolic, and luminous surfaces, she merges ancestral memory with contemporary working-class life, where every spark becomes a bloom and every act of making keeps the fire tended.
Opening : Thursday, January 22 2026, at 5 p.m.
Exhibition partner
Natalie King
Natalie King (she/they) is a queer interdisciplinary Anishinaabe (Algonquin) artist, facilitator, and member of Timiskaming First Nation. Working across painting, video, sculpture, installation, and curation, her practice explores cultural survival, memory, kinship, and the cycles of life and death. Often depicting queer and Two-Spirit kin, King’s work embraces multiplicity within Anishinaabeg identity and operates from a critical, anti-colonial, and future-bound perspective grounded in desire and survivance. Her paintings act as sites of memory, protection, and reclamation, bridging land and body, tradition and futurity through Anishinaabe teachings and kinship structures. Her recent exhibitions include POWER at ONSITE Gallery (2024), World-builders, Shape-shifters at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery (2024), Come and Get Your Love at Arsenal Contemporary (2022), and Proud Joy at Nuit Blanche Toronto (2022). She has completed permanent and public artworks for the Art Gallery of Burlington, Nuit Blanche, The Bentway, Downsview Park, and the WNBA. King holds a BFA from OCAD University, and her work is held in the permanent collections of McMaster University and the Doris McCarthy Gallery.
Artist Profile