Michael Dumontier’s Untitled (rocks and paper) (face) injects light-hearted levity into the show. The Winnepeg-based artist tranports viewers back to our childhood, re-igniting limitless youthful imagination. In this instance, Homecoming is a return to another period of life. More is less. Dumontier arranged the bare minimum of rocks to make a guiless, primitive face. Other compositions in the show also exhibit his immediately identifiable style: powerful restraint framed with soft optimism.

The bizarre and unique can be, paradoxically, common, defying their original notions. Summoning the specific yet proverbial, New Yorker Trish Tillman’s wall-mounted modular works are carefully-composed from a combination of hand-crafted and custom-fabricated pieces along with discoveries, materials, and ornaments found in fetish shops and secondhand stores. Where is the border between artist and artisan? Displaced tassels, segments of necklace chain, metal studs, and phallic shapes find alternative meaning without supressing erotic desire. A healthy measure of peculiar defiance is interspersed within each work. Tillman’s work recontextualizes African fertility statues in a new world. A modern anthropologist, Tillman imitates Native American totems, emblems, and colors to draw the viewer in, to inspect spiritual tropes, rituals, and human desires.

Homecoming creates encounters within the dichotomy of what people think is ‘art’ and what ‘art’ is. Perception reflects a different intention; the precious rests within the mundane; the kinky and the conventional become bedfellows. Art still has apprehension about the home even if commercial galleries aim to place works into collectors’ home. Objects in Homecoming return elements of the domestic into the white cube for critical and possibly moral reasons.

Thom Wolf’s novel You can’t go home, again tells the story of an artist’s search for his own place in the world. The main character struggles to reconcile his responsibilities. An artist observes the human condition, but isn’t he also responsible for eradicating injustice? True to form, Wolfe only describes how one artist tries to find his answer. The curatorial concept was inspired by the question: ‘Can we go home, again?’

CYDONIA expresses our gratitude for support from Birch Contemporary, Asya Geisberg Gallery, MKG127, and the Fort Worth Arts Council

Based in Winnipeg, Canada, Michael Dumontier co-founded The Royal Art Lodge collective in 1996 and continued as a member until 2008, along with Marcel Dzama and Neil Farber. Solo presentations for the Royal Art Lodge have been held at the Liverpool Biennial; the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; The Drawing Center, New York; and The Power Plant, Toronto. Dumontier maintains a collaborative practice with Neil Farber, meeting every Wednesday evening to collaborate on paintings, drawings, and writing. Dumontier and Farber have exhibited at Plug In ICA, Winnipeg; Salon du Dessin Contemporain, Paris; Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal; and the Hole, New York. Work by Michael Dumontier can be found in numerous private and public collections including the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the National Gallery of Canada, and he has held solo exhibitions in New York; Padua, Italy; Boston; Winnipeg; and Montréal. Dumontier is represented in Toronto by MKG127.

Micah Lexier is a Toronto-based artist whose activities including making, collecting, and organizing. He has a deep interest in measurement, increment, the passage of time, found imagery, geometry and display structures. Lexier has undertaken a number of collaborations with other visual artists, with family members, and most notably with writers, including Booker finalist Colm Tóibín, and Griffin Poetry Prize winner Christian Bök. His projects range in scale and permanence from ephemera to public sculptures. He has presented over 100 solo exhibitions, participated in more than 200 group exhibitions and has produced a dozen permanent public commissions. In 2013, The Power Plant Art Gallery hosted a fifteen-year survey exhibition of Lexier’s work entitled One, and Two, and More Than Two. In 2015 Lexier was honored with a Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts. Recent publications include I’m Thinking of A Number, a 30-year survey of Lexier’s ephemera, published by the Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, and Call Ampersand Response, a collaborative bookwork with Michael Dumontier, co- published by Nieves and Artexte. Lexier’s work is in numerous public and corporate collections including The British Museum, London, England; the Contemporary Art Gallery in Sydney, Australia; The Jewish Museum in New York; The Art Gallery of Ontario; The Vancouver Art Gallery; Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal; and The National Gallery of Canada. Micah Lexier is represented by Birch Contemporary, Toronto.

Trish Tillman was born in Chicago and lives and works in New York. She received an MFA from School of Visual Arts and a BFA from James Madison University. Tillman has had group exhibitions at Fireside Projects, NY, Present Company, NY; Cindy Rucker Gallery, NY; Regina Rex, NY; Emerson Dorsch, FL; and Elephant Art Space, CA, among others. Solo exhibitions include Civilian Art Projects, Washington, DC, and the Arlington Arts Center, VA. She is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation 2009 MFA Grant, and a 2015 Fountainhead Residency in Miami, FL. She has an upcoming solo exhibition at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, VA, and is included in upcoming group exhibitions at Washington Project for the Arts and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia.