Simon Hughes - Toronto 2025
2025 | SIMON HUGHES
THE FIRE, THE FLOOD AND ALL THE FEELINGS
TORONTO
Sept 11 - Oct 18
Opening reception : September 11, 2025, 6pm-8pm.
Simon Hughes - Evacuation, 2024
Aquarelle et matériaux mixtes sur papier / Watercolour and mixed media on paper,
65” x 42”
Simon Hughes returns to Blouin-Division’s Toronto space with a suite of expansive, multi-panel works on paper, pushing new definitions of contemporary drawing, collage, and landscape. The three quadryptychs on view are realized in his signature style of panoramic watercolour, and further probe the psychological underpinnings of landscape and the built environment. Seen together, the series is a statement on the environmental chaos, both terrible and beautiful, that is western North America today. The suburban dream collides spectacularly with natural forces in settings at once absurd and devastatingly familiar. Hughes’s lens is still trained on elements of Modernism and Surrealism; he illustrates his scenes with both dismay and reverence.
Works in the show include a panoramic landscape of an industrialized but somewhat wild foothills community suggestive of western Canada or Southern California (both of which have been home to the artist and his family), menaced by raging wildfires.
The second scene depicts a flood plain across a residential community, seen from above and rendered in Hughes’s familiar palette with isometric perspective, in reference to the Manitoba “flood of the century” in 1997. Hughes reconstructs imagery from lived memory of that time—a dangerous landscape of hard-edged shapes carrying bizarre detritus from the south.
The final panorama, Suburban Thought-Forms, refers to a famous series of illustrations accompanying Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant’s 1905 book Thought Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation, which assigned shapes and colours to human emotions and patterns of thought, as seen through the spiritual lens of Theosophy. In this piece, suburban homes “speak” the combined experience of their occupants, in a dreamy landscape awash in the glowing pastels of the northern sky.