The sum of the parts brings together a constellation of works by Stephen Andrews that examine how systems of war, resource extraction, and global capital are permitted through complacency and constructed through incremental, often hidden acts. At the centre of the exhibition is The Robert McLaughlin Gallery’s recent acquisition of Cartoon (2007), a landmark work comprised of 125 drawings on mylar that together form the stills of a single-channel video animation. Suspended between object and image, stillness and motion, the work foregrounds the mechanics of its own making. Meticulously translating found footage frame by frame through a labour-intensive drawing process, Andrews mimics the dot matrix of four-colour reproduction, softening scenes of violence into a disquieting pastel register.

This body of work emerges from Andrews’ sustained engagement with media coverage of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and extends this inquiry into the infrastructures that sustain violence—global oil production, militarized economies, and consumer complicity embedded in daily life. Attentive to the ways images circulate and accrue meaning, the work examines how these representations mediate our understanding of global events. Across the exhibition, Andrews proposes that no image, gesture, or action exists in isolation. Each is part of a broader network of cause and consequence. In bringing these works together, The sum of the parts considers how these systems are assembled and how they might, through sustained attention, be understood differently.

Stephen Andrews was born in 1956 in Sarnia, Ontario Canada. Over the last forty-five years he has exhibited his work in Canada, the U.S., Brazil, the UK, France, Italy and Japan. He is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario and other public institutions as well as many private collections.  He was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2019 His work deals with memory, identity, technology and their representations in various media including drawing, animation and painting.

I ♥ Snail is an immersive video installation by Oliver Husain that examines IMAX cinema as both an experimental film format emerging in the 1960s and a technology later mobilized as a tool of nation-building. The exhibition title is drawn from a sticker found in the archived papers of Toronto-based filmmaker Graeme Ferguson, one of the inventors of IMAX cinema. Conceived at Montreal’s Expo 67, and first realized at Expo Osaka (1970), IMAX was developed from the experimental film and expanded cinema movements into a global exhibition standard. The elaborate early theatres were significant architectural landmarks, operating as both national expos and theme parks, while serving as highly visible sites of cultural ambition and technological spectacle.

This exhibition centres on the premiere of Golden Snail (2026), a new edit and immersive 3D installation of Husain’s original IMAX film Garden of the Legend of the Golden Snail (2019). The work takes as its point of departure the Keong Emas (Golden Snail) Theatre in Jakarta, inaugurated in 1984 as Indonesia’s first IMAX cinema. Conceived under the initiative of the late Madame Suharto, the theatre’s monumental, snail-shaped architecture draws on a popular folk tale about a princess transformed into a snail, while simultaneously operating as a symbol of technological prestige and state-led modernization.

Husain situates this cinematic landmark alongside another contemporaneous project: the introduction of the Golden Apple snail as a new protein source for rural populations in Indonesia. Promoted as an efficient, future-oriented solution to food security, the snail was framed as a rational intervention aligned with national development goals, even as it later proved to be deeply environmentally destructive. By bringing these two histories into dialogue, Golden Snail traces how spectacle and sustenance, myth and modernization, were mobilized through a shared figure. Moving fluidly between the miniature and the monumental, the film reflects on how grand technological visions and everyday biological interventions alike became tools of nation-building, revealing the slippages between aspiration, control, and unintended consequence.

The exhibition also includes the premiere of MAXI (2026), a film installation housed within a series of sculptural works representing various IMAX theatres constructed from paper. The installation contains a Super 8 film shot over three years at early IMAX sites including Ontario Place in Toronto, La Géode in Paris, Futuroscope in Poitiers, and La Bola in Tijuana. In a deliberate reversal of scale, this film about the largest analogue format ever produced was shot on Super 8, the smallest available gauge, foregrounding the paradoxes embedded in IMAX’s technological scale and utopian ambition.

Artist Bio
Artist and filmmaker Oliver Husain is based in Toronto, Canada. His projects are often collaborations with other artists and friends; and often begin with a fragment of history, a rumour, a personal encounter or a distant memory. He uses a wide range of cinematic languages, technical experiments and visual pleasures — such as dance, puppetry, costume, special effects — to animate his research and fold the viewers into complex narrative set-ups. 

This Exhibition has been supported by Partners in Art under its Artist-Direct Program.

We are pleased to present the annual Durham College Thesis Exhibition!

Like all visionary explorers, the students in Durham College’s Fine Arts Advanced program are involved in a continual process of identifying and studying meaningful subjects that pertain to their own evolving bodies of work. They first research then develop strategies unique to their practice through experimentation, all the while learning to define and focus their personal interests. This exhibition includes a wide range of subjects, interests, and mediums.

Celebrate EMERGING VISIONS with the staff and students of Durham College! The opening reception will be hosted on May 1, 2026. Then, stop by the gallery at 1pm on May 13^th for an artist-led tour of the exhibition. This is your chance to learn more about specific projects and hear about the journey from conception to fabrication to presentation.