Foil Gallery, Montreal, Quebec
July 3—5, 2025
When the Air Is Blue, Dre Wilkin’s most recent body of work, captures a deepening inquiry into perception, affect, and memory through figuration. Built within a framework of inversion, the exhibition invites the viewer to reconsider the ways through which we perceive light, form, and atmosphere.
By reversing the naturally occurring relationships between shadows, highlights, and colour, Wilkin not only subverts painterly conventions but also disrupts our perceptual instincts and logics as viewers. Much of the work draws from the artist’s own circles, with peers and family members appearing as subjects. Their presence grounds the paintings in lived intimacy even as they move toward abstraction.
This play between inversion and recognition was extended into the exhibition space itself, where a projector room displayed a live feed of visitors moving through the gallery. In this immersive installation, guests experienced themselves reflected back within the works, this time with the paintings digitally inverted back to reality, further complicating the boundaries between perception and representation.
Much like dusk from which it takes its name, When the Air Is Blue occupies a liminal space between presence and absence, between interiority and observation. As we engage with figures caught in moments of focus or stillness, we too are suspended in the tension between reality and abstraction.
A year in the making, the exhibition consisted of a total of ten works and marked Wilkin’s first solo since 2018.