Fragile Residue presents the work of Ernesto Cabral de Luna, Delali Cofie, and Amara King. Within photographic practices often taking a non-traditional approach, these artists’ utilization of various media and visual devices—and their invocation of archives, both literal and figurative—speaks to the instability of memory, the power of disrupting the historical record, and the mercurial nature of the concept of “home.” In the following text, curator Dainesha Nugent-Palache poetically explores the themes woven throughout these artists’ works, her curatorial influences, and her fluid approach to the exhibition.

Fragile residue is crop residue that breaks down easily and is effortlessly buried by tillage, like a memory or a photograph forgotten in an album, waiting to be unearthed decades later by an interrogative seed, sprouting successive significance. Fragile residue is more likely to be blown away, involuntarily thrusted by winds of authority onto far-off, inhospitable soils.  

Whether overtly or unintentionally, the archive exists as a pulse to every photographic practice—each photograph produced becomes ordained into a larger register of images. For many of us, our first encounters with visual archives come in the form of family albums. I credit the many hours of my childhood spent perusing images taken well before I was even conceived of for sparking my initial interest in photography, and my subsequent stylistic influences. Speaking with other photographers, it became apparent that this juvenile preoccupation wasn’t at all idiosyncratic, that we each found a peculiar, shared imperative within this ritual, to contribute to what we had been surveying. I also recognize the privileges associated with the ability to access an archive, to locate yourself within it, and the power that may be reclaimed through self-insertion.

Fragile Residue brings together the work of three emerging Toronto-based visual artists––Ernesto Cabral de Luna, Delali Cofie, and Amara King—each working primarily in photography and possessing a strong sense of materiality. Within their respective practices, these artists often employ a non-traditional approach to photography, leading to their arrival at work that pushes the definitions of the genre. Using visual and photographic devices such as abstraction, distortion, blur, and deterioration articulates the disembodiment and decay of memory and sentiments of home, while simultaneously rejecting clarity and exactness.

Due to the delicate and personal nature of the imagery and subject matter in this exhibition, each of the artists was given the creative freedom to produce new work or to expand upon previously developed work without any curatorial restraints nor the expectation of presenting “legible” narratives. My curatorial strategy was to lead with trust while remaining available for dialogue and relation, being okay with not knowing what the work would become, and allowing the opaque and the unseen to extend beyond theoretical scaffolding, and put into praxis.

While developing the curatorial direction for this exhibition, I was struck by the concept of “tropical abstraction.” The term rang through my mind in a manner suggesting it must already be possessed by a clear definition that would yield dozens of internet search results prompting me to log into the academic database JSTOR. All I found was the title of a group show at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 2005, curated by Roos Gortzak. That exhibition featured artists from Latin America and sought to deconstruct “platitudes and historical narratives about the tropics.” Even if the artworks themselves accomplished this, the curator’s being a Dutch woman with no connection to the exhibition’s criteria made it feel like another ethnographic exercise to me––precisely what I had hoped an existing definition would interrogate.

Artists from cultures with colonized and diasporic histories are too often burdened with the obligation to explain themselves within the terms of dominant frameworks, rooted in “hyperreality”¹and  subject to unwarranted reinterpretation. Everything must tend toward transparency and exposure, ready to be consumed and decoded. All three artists in Fragile Residue happen to be connected to places much farther south than Canada, places where palm trees have no issue growing, and outsiders get off on exoticizing.

As we traverse into a brave new world, legibility is worn like a target. The “right to opacity”² protects, conceals, and resists. Distorted and pixelated photographs become radical stances—disappearances within the visible. Opacity is a refusal to be fully known or categorized, a preservation of agency and self-determination, just as Glissant envisioned.

…

Images of home 

materials from home

materials that conjure 

memories 

of home

memory 

as 

material  

You can’t capture

memories in full focus

The retelling of a story is never immune to accidental fate 

of becoming a lie 

If you weren’t there and neither was I did the tree really fall?

Is the cat still in the box?  

Rust/dust/pixels/the smallest units of information/specks 

the whole picture encoded with meaning 

the weight of time   

&

A right to opacity

the power provided by a protective cloak that becomes crystalline when gazed upon by a particularly receptive set of eyes 

=

The freedom to create without being bound to preconceived expectations determined by forces outside of oneself

Presented by the plumb

1. Baudrillard’s concept of "hyperreality" refers to a state where simulations and representations become so pervasive that they overshadow and replace the real. Within the hyperreal there is a "disappearance" of the real.

2. Édouard Glissant, “For Opacity,” in Poetics of Relation, (The University of Michigan Press, 1997).

Curated by Dainesha Nugent-Palache

• Ernesto Cabral de Luna (b. 1996, Cholula) is a Mexican lens-based artist working in Toronto. He holds an Honours BFA in photography from OCAD University, and is the recipient of the 2024 Barbara Astman Photography Award, the 2021 Wendy Coburn Art and Social Change Scholarship, the 2024 Gallery 44 Residency Award, and the 2024 Partners in Art's Artist-Direct Grant. Ernesto has exhibited at Patel Brown, Ignite Gallery, Ada Slaight, Xpace Cultural Center, and Abbozzo Gallery, and has worked closely with organizations including The Toronto Raptors, Coors Light, Walmart Canada, Delta Marriott Hotels, Luminato Festival, and Critical Distance Centre for Curators.

   

• Delali Cofie is a Ghanaian-Nigerian photographer living in Toronto, Canada. He is a recent graduate of OCAD University, where he was the recipient of the Barbara Astman and Peter Sramek photography awards, and the OCAD U Medal. Through storytelling, he engages in multiple genres of photography such as fine art, documentary, and fashion, frequently creating work between his native city of Accra and his current city of Toronto, to tell a tale of two cities linked by a diasporic thread. Delali has exhibited in Toronto at Patel Brown, Gallery 44, and Harbourfront Center; at the Black Art Centre, Surrey; and was featured in legendary Ghanaian photographer James Barnor’s exhibition catalogue at the Arles Photography Festival.

• Amara King (b. 1997, Toronto) is a graduate of OCAD University with a BFA in Photography and minor in Printmaking, and was the 2025 recipient of the Gallery 44 Emerging Artist Award. At the intersection of experimentation and conceptual practices, Amara engages with a range of mediums to investigate the nuances of being (a)part of the Caribbean diaspora, navigating through themes of belonging, identity, history, culture, and storytelling. Her work aims to implement space for the viewer to engage all five senses, to feel, remember, and immerse themselves within the landscapes we call home—spaces both familiar and ephemeral.

   

• Dainesha Nugent-Palache is an MFA candidate at Bard College Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, and a founding member of Toronto artist collective and gallery, the plumb. She holds a BFA from OCAD University, where she received The Dorothy Hoover Research Award, and Photography Faculty and Friends Award. She was a 2021 recipient of the Scotia Bank New Generation Photography Award. Her work has recently been exhibited at Patel Brown, National Gallery of Canada, McMaster Museum of Art, and Art Gallery of Ontario. Her work belongs to The Wedge Collection, TD Bank Art Collection, EQ Bank Art collection, and private collections.