Katie Butler: Illuminating Emotions Through Symbolic Canvases

An art fair may unfold over only a few days, but the relationships that shape it, and the opportunities it creates, can have a lasting influence on the wider art market. This episode of ArtBeat features Emily-Jean Alexander, director of Art Toronto and Artist Project. With experience producing nearly 30 fairs across Canada and the United States, Emily-Jean reflects on an unconventional career journey, the unexpected opportunities that shaped her perspective, and what returning to Art Toronto has meant after years spent working in different art markets. Drawing on her experience with both artist-led and gallery-led fairs, Emily-Jean offers insight into the relationships that sustain the art ecosystem and the challenges confronting it. The conversation examines the financial pressures facing galleries, the complexities of making art more accessible, and how fairs can create meaningful value for exhibitors while encouraging new audiences to engage with and acquire art. With Art Toronto's 27th edition approaching, Emily-Jean discusses her renewed emphasis on participating galleries, the introduction of Emerging Collectors Evening and Ready to Collect, and the opportunities for greater collaboration between Art Toronto and Artist Project. At the centre of her approach is a longer-term ambition to strengthen Canada's art market and foster a culture in which collecting, living with art and supporting artists are more deeply embedded. Art Toronto takes place at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre's North Building from October 30 to November 1, 2026, preceded by a special Opening Night on Thursday, October 29, benefiting the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. Tickets for the fair and Opening Night are available at arttoronto.ca.

ArtBeat concludes its special series with Art With Heart, in support of Casey House, with Toronto painter Erin Armstrong. As a child, Erin would fake being sick so she could stay home in her mother’s studio. She grew up assuming she would become an artist, and still says painting is the one thing she knows “for sure in my bones” she was meant to do. She has also been preoccupied since childhood with how strange it is to be alive. That feeling sits underneath much of her work. Her figures are not portraits so much as placeholders for whoever is looking, set within scenes that seem familiar until something slips slightly out of place. Erin gives us enough to enter the image without ever resolving exactly what has happened. For most of the last decade, one figure carried that unease. Now the canvases are filling with people. Erin has returned to classical picnic scenes, recasting their pastoral ease for a moment when uncertainty feels more collective. She has been thinking of the new body of work as “a picnic at the end of the world.” Erin’s first contribution to Art With Heart is Spades. Art With Heart takes place October 19, 2026, at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. The silent auction opens October 13. Purchase your tickets here.

ArtBeat’s special series with Art With Heart, in support of Casey House, continues with Spencer Shevlen, one of the curatorial committee’s co-chairs, and committee member Craig D’Arville. Spencer has been attending Art With Heart with his family for years, often bidding alongside his mom. Part of what keeps bringing him back is the possibility of discovering an artist he has never encountered before and getting behind the work early. Over seven years on the committee, listening to how other people see has also expanded his own instincts as a collector. Craig arrives from another side of the art world. After decades of working directly with artists, he is acutely aware of how much visibility can matter, particularly for accomplished practices that exist outside traditional gallery representation. Art With Heart can put that work in front of collectors and dealers who may otherwise never come across it, sometimes before the final collection has even been decided. Those perspectives meet around a table where people are expected to make a case for what they believe in. A committee member can arrive convinced about one piece and leave persuaded by another. The collection has to work as a whole, appeal to the people who will eventually bid and, above all, raise meaningful support for Casey House. Spencer and Craig also challenge the idea that collecting requires expertise or a particular kind of life. Art With Heart offers a way to encounter established names alongside artists who may be entirely new to you. Their advice is refreshingly uncomplicated: pay attention to what excites you, buy what you love and let your eye develop from there. Art With Heart takes place October 19, 2026, at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. The silent auction opens October 13. Purchase your tickets here.

ArtBeat launches its special series with Art With Heart, in support of Casey House, with Toronto artist Phuong Nguyen. Early in her practice, Phuong felt a pressure to make work about where she came from. Being Vietnamese seemed to come with an expectation that identity should become subject matter, something she was reluctant to let define the work. Her work eventually found another route through chinoiserie. What interested Phuong was the distance between lived culture and the version of Asia imagined through European decorative traditions. From there, she began looking more closely at ornamentalism and at the ways Asian women have historically been defined through decoration itself. Historical sources often become part of the making process, leading her toward forms that can suggest both ornament and the body. For Art With Heart, Phuong returned to a motif found in a French colonial publication and translated it into a carved wooden form. Its shape begins to suggest a torso or ribcage, with a small ceramic heart placed inside. Phuong also speaks about her work as an art therapist and registered psychotherapist, and about the role stigma can play in preventing people from accessing care and support. Her connection to Casey House is tied closely to that understanding, as well as to something she has been reconsidering in her own life: love and care are not passive. They are things we practise through action, again and again. Art With Heart takes place October 19, 2026, at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. The silent auction opens October 13. Purchase your tickets here.

The next day, Kyle Scheurmann continues further north, moving through wildfire sites and clear cuts as the trip begins to come to a close. He reflects on what it’s like to come out of those environments and sit with what you’ve seen, and how that begins to affect the work. An encounter in a remote valley turns into an exchange, and the final stretch of the trip leads to standing at the edge of protected land while wildfire burns on either side. It’s a moment that’s difficult to reconcile, and one that continues to inform We Could Have Been A Mountain, on view at Bau-Xi Gallery in Vancouver until April 28. This is Part Two of a two-part release. Part One is available here.