Upcoming
Aryen Hoekstra
In storage
June 12 - July 11, 2025
In 2016, Aryen Hoekstra founded Franz Kaka in Toronto, Canada as an artist-led gallery presenting exhibitions that privileged experimentation and risk-taking. In 2019, the gallery began formally representing a number of the artists who had previously exhibited, including Lotus L. Kang, HaeAhn Paul Kwon Kajander, Anne Low, and Elif Saydam. It was at this point that Hoekstra abandoned his own studio practice to pursue a fulltime career as a gallerist. In the years since, the gallery has expanded its international reach through gallery collaborations and art fair participations, including recent presentations at Art Basel, Frieze London, and the Armory Show. Known for presenting materially curious and conceptually complex exhibitions, the gallery champions nuanced practices that transform and deepen through sustained engagement, fostering dynamic conversations with audiences locally and abroad.
Researching from the perspective of an academic and artist, but also as a gallerist, Hoekstra examines the way that art objects are handled and traded. In storage delves into the under-examined logistics of the art business, the storage and shipping of artworks, their care and circulation. Noting the deliberate separation of art and commerce that is implied in traditional gallery floorplans, Hoekstra muddies this distinction by transplanting Franz Kaka’s crate storage into McIntosh’s West Gallery for a period of four weeks. Here the day-to-day operations of the gallery and their practical encumbrances are presented in place of the sacralized objects they are designed and built to protect.
In Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (2005), Olav Velthius considers the way that commercial art galleries reinforce the separation between art and commerce. Finding that certain physical attributes have become standardized regardless of budget or location, Velthuis offers the following as a description of the general ‘look’ of a contemporary art gallery’s exhibition space:
The front of the gallery contains, depending on its size, one or more exhibition spaces. These spaces have concrete or wooden floors (carpets are hardly ever used), white walls without ornamentation, no furnishings, and neon or bright halogen lights, whose fixtures resemble those of construction sites. The minimal decor, absence of furniture, and lighting of the gallery space create an atmosphere that reinforces the autonomy of the artwork on display, and keeps commerce at bay.
Unlike Franz Kaka, McIntosh Gallery is not a commercial endeavour, yet it too follows this architectural separation, which preserves the sacred character of the exhibition space as distinct from the earthly, common and otherwise profane transactions that are necessary to support its operation. In storage makes use of this logistical opportunity to question the intractability of this separation and to examine what results as we approach its horizon.
Aryen Hoekstra is a PhD candidate in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University. In storage is his thesis exhibition and draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Graduate student exhibitions at McIntosh Gallery are presented in memory of King's College alumnus Gregory Franklin Child through the generous support of Western University Arts and Humanities alumni Paula Case Child and Timothy Child.
