BETWEEN BREATHS. BETWEEN PLACES
Presented by Akin
Curated by Renato Baldin
March 12-15
Opening Reception March 12 from 6-9pm
Remote Gallery, 568 Richmond St W, Toronto
Gallery hours:
March 12: 6-9pm
March 13: 4-8pm
March 14: 1-5pm
March 15: 1-5pm
Akin is proud to present Between Breaths, Between Places, an exhibition curated by Renato Baldin that features 14 members of the Akin Team, artists who are not only developing their own creative research, but who also form the team responsible for running and shaping the organization. Akin is an organization created by and for artists; a space that breathes through the art practices of its members. Like the exhibition itself, Akin emerges as a collective organism, adaptive, and in motion. What is presented here is not a fixed portrait of an institution, but a living constellation of practices, continually shaped by time, collaboration, and becoming.
Featuring artwork by Azadeh Elmizadeh, Bettina Westwood, Charlotte Van Ryn, Faisal Karadsheh, Haley Meyer, Jen Pilles, Liliana Botero, Miles Ingrassia, Mykah Czarina, Oliver Pauk, Özge Aytekin, Renato Baldin, Theresa Hopkins & Torin Craig
Between Breaths, Between Places brings together photographic, sculptural, and video-based practices that operate between the physical and the digital, the natural and the constructed, the stable and the dissolving. Across the exhibition, bodies, materials, spaces, and identities are not understood as fixed forms, but as states of becoming: shaped by time, intervention, erosion, and care.
Breath appears as both presence and pause; a measure of life, of attention, of emotional weight. It marks moments of vulnerability, decision, and transformation. The works register how bodies carry their histories quietly, repairing themselves, absorbing loss, and learning how to move forward while holding what has already passed.
Places, too, are unstable. Landscapes - urban, imagined, virtual, or remembered - hover between recognition and distortion. They are built, undone, and rebuilt by memory, environment, and desire. Transitional spaces mirror fractured recollections; identities emerge not as a fixed structure but as something porous, performed, and exposed to change.
Together, these works suggest that art, like the body and the spaces it inhabits, behaves as an organism: breathing, adapting, and continuously negotiating its place between presence and disappearance. What remains is not permanence, but motion. An ongoing exchange between inner states and outer worlds, between what is held and what is released.
Participating Artists:
Azadeh Pirazimian
Azadeh Pirazimian (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist originally from northern Iran. Her practice examines power structures, belonging, and everyday resistance through feminist and intersectional lenses. Working across drawing, performance, and video, she fosters dialogue and critical inquiry.
www.azadehpirazimian.com
@azadeh_pirazimian
Bettina Westwood
Bettina Westwood creates sculptural ceramics that play in the space between representation and abstraction, touching on how fragmented recollections and the subconscious intertwine to create new stories.
www.bettinawestwood.com
@bettinawestwood
Charlotte Van Ryn
Charlotte Van Ryn (she/her) is a fiction writer, poet, and artist. Her work often reflects on queerness, counterculture, and the Canadian landscape.
@van_ryn
Faisal Karadsheh
As an artist and cultural worker based between Amman and T’karonto/Toronto, Faisal Karadsheh engages in an interdisciplinary practice that moves fluidly between the imagined and the material. Central to their work is an exploration of how bodies and objects register time, how they rust, weather, merge, or fracture, and a consideration of how art might breathe with those same forces, embracing rather than resisting change.
www.faisalkaradsheh.com
@pillontheloose
Haley Meyer
Haley Meyer is a Toronto-based oil painter. Her work explores the connection between memory loss, transitional spaces, and fleeting images. Painting from her personal archive of photographs, she is able to organize, preserve, and recall fading experiences. In 2025, she received her BFA in Drawing & Painting from OCAD University.
www.haley-meyer.format.com/2025paintings
@haleymeyerart
Miles Ingrassia
Ingrassia’s practice investigates contemporary masculinity and the contradictions within its performance; how emotions and actions like tenderness, aggression, desire, and shame coexist beneath inherited cultural norms. Through large-scale figurative oil paintings, he explores the social and emotional terrain of young men navigating identity and intimacy.
Jen Pilles
Jen Pilles is a plein-air artist. Her mindful practice celebrates place, presence, and moments in time. She considers each opportunity to create as a chance to expand the scope of her practice, and learn more about the world and herself. She combines drawing and painting, using a variety of mediums.
www.jenpilles.com
Liliana Botero
Liliana Botero is a Colombian-Canadian glass artist, jeweller, ceramist and graphic designer.
She draws inspiration from the natural world, particularly its brightness, translucency and tones that enhance the colour range of life.
Liliana currently runs a glass/ceramic studio in Toronto.
Mykah Czarina
I'm a painter and illustrator practicing in multiple media, from digital to canvas to walls. Currently I'm exploring personal and Filipino cultural history, in an attempt to create a connected path forward for myself as well as my fellow Filipinos in diaspora. Other recurring inspirations are nature conservation, collective healing and living with loss. I graduated from Sheridan for illustration which fostered my love for painting. More specifically, to continue investigating the range between representational and abstraction. Lately I've been using oil, oil pastels and acrylic in my personal work with a focus on large scale murals or canvasses.
www.mykahcdc.com
@mykahcdc
Oliver Pauk
Oliver Pauk’s practice centres on photographic, sculptural, and video-based elements, blurring the boundary between physical and digital art. He investigates the ways in which digitally-captured objects can be translated back into the physical realm through iterative processes, involving recursive stages of 3D scanning and printing, CNC milling, and hand-carving.
Özge Aytekin
Coming from an interdisciplinary background, my practice moves between painting, sculpture, and installation to create narratives that carry a light sense of wit, whimsy, and optimism. While painting and mixed media remain central, I often incorporate drawing, photography, and collage during the preparatory stages of production. Through this process, I examine our emotional relationships to cityscapes and landscapes—embracing their variety, absurdities, and unexpected moments. The resulting works construct fantastical narratives of memory and presence, positioned between fantasy and realism, and invite viewers to linger with the emotional residue of fleeting moments.
Renato Baldin
Renato Baldin is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist, activist, and curator. His current work focuses on immersive art installations reflecting his immigrant and queer perspective.
A recipient of the Newcomer Mentorship Grant from TAC in 2022 and Aluna’s Digital Lab Residency in 2023. His recent art works includes the exhibitions and installations Fluids (2024), Queerleidoscope (2023), Narcissus (2023), Non-Exhibition (2022), Rocking Futures (2021), and The Empathy Museum: Walking in your shoes (2017).
As well, Renato designed the set and costume for the plays Kill Your Father (2026), Public Enemy (2025), The Rage of Narcissus (2022), and curated the exhibition A Country of a Thousand Colours for Caminos Festival (2022).
Theresa Hopkins
Theresa Hopkins is a black multi-disciplinary artist and arts organizer living and working in Toronto. She focuses on themes surrounding identity, emotion, and her interactions with the world through her unique lens. Using colourful and tactile materials and subject matter, her work draws on nostalgia juxtaposed with mature themes.
Torin Craig
Torin is an artist and musician working in Toronto. He works with installation, sound, and oil painting and explores themes of nostalgia, sensory experience, counterculture, and the occult. He has completed a BFA at OCAD University and an MFA at York University.
www.torincraig.format.com
@paisleyrobeforthegoldenglobe
Akin Gallery Crawl – Saturday March 14
As part of the next Akin Gallery Crawl visitors are invited to visit Between Breaths, Between Places, followed by a group visit to artist-run galleries at 401 Richmond. More details to be announced soon!