Vanessa McKernan | Dusk
September 13–27

Reception: Saturday, September 13 @ 3 - 5 pm,
RSVP your attendance to responses@wallspacegallery.ca

Presales open Saturday, September 6 at 10 am, in-person, online, and over the phone at 613-729-0003. Please contact the gallery if you'd like to view the works in-person.

Wall Space Gallery is excited to present Dusk, the latest solo exhibition by Vanessa McKernan.
Dusk invites us into a world where the seen and the felt intertwine. Through luminous oil paintings and dreamlike figuration, McKernan explores the quiet transitions that shape our inner and outer lives. The exhibition unfolds in the in-between moments: where day gives way to night, clarity yields to reverie, and waking drifts toward dreaming.

At the heart of McKernan’s practice is a deep inquiry into relationship. Her paintings reflect on the emotional and spiritual threads that connect us to one another, to ourselves, and to the natural world. Figures emerge in landscapes that feel both familiar and otherworldly, drawn from memory, imagination, and direct observation. These spaces are not anchored to a single place or time. Instead, they evoke the liminality of myths half-remembered, stories told through gesture, color, and atmosphere rather than fixed narrative.

Dusk is a meditation on transformation. It offers a pause, a soft threshold, where viewers are invited to reconnect with their own fleeting moments of wonder, vulnerability, and connection. These are paintings to be felt as much as seen.


Curator
Haruka Toyoda

Vanessa McKernan

Vanessa McKernan is an oil painter from Toronto who recently relocated to the countryside of the Ottawa Valley with her family of four. Vanessa views the act of painting as a dynamic practice, where the unconscious intermingles with ideas and imagery taken from dreams, observations, historical works of art, and personal experiences. Often drawing on the inherent symbology of the garden, her paintings explore cycles of death and rebirth, impermanence, intimacy, mothering and the intricacies of the feminine psyche.
Vanessa holds a BFA from Concordia University and is a two-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshield Foundation Award. Her work is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.