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SUM AiR — Makoto Chi

Sept 13 – Oct 15, 2025

SUM gallery is excited to continue our SUM-AiR (SUM gallery Artist-in-Residence) program with interdisciplinary artist Makoto Chi. Beginning September 13, Makoto joins us for a month-long residency in advance of his solo exhibition at SUM gallery, opening October 16, presented in partnership with Powell Street Festival Society. Welcome, Makoto! 

ABOUT MAKOTO CHI

Makoto Chi is a visual artist, born and raised in Canada and currently based in Western Massachusetts. His formal training and practice span tattooing, drawing, and painting, with forays into sculpture and installation. These disciplines cross-pollinate, merging tattoo motifs, illustrative narrative, and linework-heavy figuration into a personal visual language.

His work centres monstrous and chimeric figures as stand-ins for inner psychological landscapes, experiences, and observations around the communities he inhabits. Entangled in ambiguous, libidinous states of conflict and intimacy, figuration is a site for Makoto to explore queer eros, ritual, diasporic longing for placeness, and liminal thresholds between tenderness and brutality. He refracts witnessed experiences and inherited stories through the lens of hybridity and self-invention, while creating space for viewers to locate themselves within the work.

Makoto’s practice is deeply informed by the visual cultures, mythologies, and spiritualities of his Japanese and Ashkenazi Jewish heritages, as well as his queer, gendered experiences. In these intertwined histories—marked paradoxically by exile, internment, and grave violence—he finds fertile ground for reimagining. The erotic charge within anthropomorphic and hybrid bodies becomes a means to rupture traditional narratives, re-knitting severed connections with familial ancestorhood and generating new, unexpected meanings.

While his work is shaped by identity, it is not bound to it. He seeks to communicate across cultural boundaries, engage with the possibilities and contradictions of freedom of movement, and dwell in the generative space of in-betweenness.

Makoto graduated from Emily Carr University with a BFA in Illustration in 2015. He has been tattooing since 2004/05, and currently lives at Lupinewood Collective, a majority trans, all-queer intentional collective living project in Western Massachusetts.

SHAPESHIFTERS — Curated by Carmen Levy-Milne | Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, Kelowna

Sept 12 – Oct 25, 2025

For the first time ever, SUM gallery is expanding our activities to the Okanagan, thanks to a partnership with Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art in Kelowna! We’re proud to be a part of their Shapeshifters exhibition, curated by Carmen Levy-Milne.

In this exhibition, the collaborative artist trio Kendell Yan, Chris Reed, and Romi Kim will explore the intersections of queer monsters inspired by myths and stories from their unique cultures. A common thread woven through Chinese, Cree, and Korean folklore is the notion of shapeshifters, fictional beings that can transform themselves from one physical form into another. Including a series of lenticular printed photographs, an exploratory film, a performance, and a community centered workshop, the artists come to this project representing stories from their respective heritages while considering the intersections and compatibility between these folktales and their drag personas and gender identities.

Locals and visitors to Kelowna are welcome to the join the opening reception; 6 – 8pm on Friday September 12th. This special opening includes a live performance by Yan, Reed, and Kim; you don’t want to miss this! The opening is free and open to the public, with light snacks and refreshments provided.

Register Here

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Shapeshifters are a multidisciplinary QTIPOC artist collective based on the stolen lands of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations. Romi Kim (they/them) , Chris Reed (they/them), and Kendell Yan (she/they) are close friends, drag performers and accomplices. Also known as SKIM (he/him), Continental Breakfast (they/them) and Maiden China (she/they).

Shapeshifters have been collaborating since 2022. Their artistic practice is rooted in collective care, cultural and community histories, kinship, and queer liberation. Shapeshifters have exhibited work at Sum gallery (2022), the Vancouver Queer Film Festival (2023), James Black Gallery (2023), and Queer Arts Festival (2023).

Carmen Levy-Milne (she/her) is a curator and cultural worker born and raised on the unceded land of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm people. As a diasporic Jewish settler, her practice is primarily concerned with the philosophy of tikkun olam (“the repair of the world”), where she sees her work in the arts sphere as responsible for uplifting reparative, decolonial, and critical artistic responses to our broader social, political, and cultural circumstances. She holds an MA in Critical & Curatorial Studies from UBC and a BA in Communication and Cultural Studies with a Minor in Religion and Cultures from Concordia University. Her work has been featured by the AHVA Gallery, the Burnaby Art Gallery, Centre A, Deer Lake Gallery, and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.

Presented in partnership with Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, thanks to generous support from the Canada Arts Presentation Fund, administered by the Department of Canadian Heritage.

DARK WREATH — Babe Siegl | THIS Gallery

Sept 26 – Oct 5, 2025

We’re so happy to be a community partner for THIS Gallery‘s upcoming exhibition: a solo show by our very own Babe Siegl!   

Babe Siegl’s Dark Wreath merges digital precision with the tactile richness of oil painting to explore the complexities of queer identity in a digital age. His surreal, vividly chromatic compositions shimmer with artificial reflections, gendered symbols, and dreamlike figures that reflect cycles of harm—shame, toxic masculinity, and internalized prejudice—caught in endless loops. Yet alongside melancholy lies humour and vitality: his characters, playful as toys or avatars, embody queerness as fluid, adaptive, and ever-becoming. Through this hybridity of medium and meaning, Siegl reveals the tension and resilience at the heart of contemporary queer experience.

Join us for the opening reception on Saturday, September 27, from 12 – 4pm at THIS Gallery (108 East Broadway, back alley entrance).

ABOUT BABE SIEGL

Benjamin/Babe Siegl (he/him) is a painter, animator, and occasional curator based in Vancouver. His work explores contemporary queer identity through the lenses of painting, drawing, animation, and digital media. Originally from Florida, Siegl holds a BFA from Florida State University (2011) and an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2017). He is a long-term staff member of the Pride in Art Society, a Vancouver-based queer arts charity.