TIAN Contemporain is pleased to present its summer exhibition En Flux, featuring works by six gallery artists: Robin Crofut-Brittingham, Yen- Chao Lin, Sarah Tompkins, Roxane Fiore, Sarah Bertrand-Hamel, and Jeanette Johns. This exhibition invites viewers to transcend beyond the immediacy of the gaze as a fleeting and fixed perspective, to indulge in the act of sustained contemplation, uncovering slow surprises and leisurely delights.

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Robin Crofut-Brittingham’s intricate ecological utopias brim lush with colorful flora and fauna, inviting discovery through each meticulous detail. Hidden within her utopias— caution tape, extinct species, and poisonous plants—develop equally complex and layered narratives that revel in slow contemplation and the careful construction of imagined worlds. Yen-Chao Lin’s sculptural compositions evoke hidden realms of perception and intuition. Delicate appearances are contrasted by the utilitarian tactility of her chosen materials, creating a shifting mirage of form and feeling. Sarah Tompkins’ ethereal abstractions operate as psychic terrains, offering viewers a passage through a sculptural landscape of organic silhouettes and otherworldly hues. Her canvases unlock subconscious connections, softening the boundary between inner world and external perception. Sarah Bertrand-Hamel’s works unfold through a long process of plant cultivation and paper-making. Her sewn paper and ink compositions are painted first then assembled, “constructing stains” that reveal the effects of time, labor, and material sensitivity with each closer look. Jeanette Johns’ printed works offer windows into the layered construction of visual experience. Moving between paper and weaving, she evokes the tactile intimacy of rhythm and mouvement, oscillating between sensory memory and structural elegance. Roxane Fiore’s chalk pastel drawings perform subtle trompe l’oeil illusions—folds, cuts, and layers of paper that dissolve upon closer inspection. Her compositions compel repeated viewing, drawing the eye into a liminal space where illusion and reality are pleasantly blurred. Together, the works in En Flux invite a slowing down—a deliberate pause—in which vision becomes a process of unfolding, and meaning emerges not in immediacy, but through the deliberate persistence of looking.

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ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

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Robin Crofut-Brittingham (b. 1989, USA) received her BA from Bard College with a focus in Poetry and Art History and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in California. Drawing inspiration from mythology, science fiction, current events, and personal history, her work grows from a fascination with ways in which humans interact with the natural world. Through the creation of fantasy worlds and beings, her finely detailed drawings reimagine concepts of natural disasters, evolution, and extinction, to hint towards a new and harmonious order of coexistence. She has previously exhibited at the Sandisfield Arts Center (MA, USA), Foreman Art Gallery (Sherbrooke, QC), and Future Art Fair (USA), among others.

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Yen-Chao Lin (b. 1983, Taiwan) is a Taipei-born Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist. Through means of intuitive play, collaboration, scavenging and collecting, her tactile practice often incorporates various craft techniques, such as copper enamelling, ceramic, textile, and gilding, to create installations, sculptures, and experimental films. She has previously exhibited at: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Montreal), OBORO (Montreal), SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art (Montreal), Art Metropole (Toronto), Berlinale, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Hong-gah Museum (Taipei), among others. She has been invited to give public presentations at Artexte (Montreal), Centre A (Vancouver), GAX Asian Indigenous Relations in Contemporary Art (Montréal), and PHI Foundation (Montréal).

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Sarah Tompkins (b. 1990, Canada) completed her BFA in painting and printmaking at Queen’s University and her MFA in painting at the University of Ottawa. She has exhibited at SAW Gallery (Ottawa), Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston), the Ottawa Art Gallery (Ottawa), and Olga Korper Gallery (Toronto). Her works are found in the collections of Fidelity Investments Art Collection, Google Canada, Global Affairs Canada, and others. Tompkins lives and works in Ottawa, Ontario.

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Roxane Fiore (b. 1993, Canada) obtained her bachelor’s degree in Painting and Drawing from Concordia University in 2018. Her chalk pastel drawings emerge from small, meticulously crafted paper assemblages, which serve as the foundation for imagined and illusory worlds. The resulting trompe-l’oeil effect invites a longer contemplation, encouraging reflection on the construction of reality from fragments of visual information, emphasizing the interplay between perception and interpretation. She has recently exhibited at ARTSPLACE Gallery in Nova Scotia, Plural art fair, and will soon be showing at Centre d’exposition Léo-Ayotte, Shawinigan.

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Sarah Bertrand-Hamel (b. 1981, Canada) obtained her bachelors in Fine Arts at Université Laval in 2006 and her Masters of Fine Arts at Concordia University in 2014. Working primarily with paper, Bertrand-Hamel is inspired by its material transformations and its renewed potentialities through reconstruction. She is interested in the notion of transition, perpetual movement, and the unceasing emergence of beings and things which are integrating into one another to exist in new forms. Her works are featured in public and private collections, including the Museo national de la cerámica (Mexico), Loto-Québec and Cirque du Soleil.

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Jeanette Johns (b. 1983, Canada) holds a BFA in Printmaking from the University of Manitoba, and an MFA in Studio Arts (Print Media concentration) from Concordia University. Her work is based on observation and the gaze, focusing particularly on two- dimensional representations of space. Through drawing, photography, and etching, she elegantly explores scientific systems of representing the world such as diagrams, perspective games, and optical illusions. Her works are found in the collections of: Fidelity Investments Art Collection, The Crown Collection, Rideau Hall, Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec, Toronto Dominion Bank, Manitoba Arts Branch, Atelier Graff Archives, Manitoba Hydro art collection, and Open Studio Archives, Toronto.