Meet the Artist: Friday, July 11, 6 - 8 pm
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 12, 2 - 4 pm
In Quietly Screaming, Chanel DesRoches offers a body of work suspended between contradiction and conviction, where painterly boldness is not evidence of certainty, but a choreography of evasion, vulnerability, and persistence.
DesRoches builds her paintings through restless signals and layered mark-making, colliding oil paint, oil stick, graphite, and pastel into dense visual tangles. In large-scale works like Backfire and Suffocated Feelings, material accumulates to a point of smothering density. These surfaces act as defence mechanisms and emotional outbursts, simultaneously pushing the viewer back while pulling them into their chaos. DesRoches’ practice emerges from a tension between visibility and withdrawal. As a Queer woman negotiating the pressures of public space and personal history, she uses abstraction as a tool of deflection and camouflage. Her marks, scribbles, cuts, and smudges channel anxiety, sarcasm, and resistance. The paintings do not aim for resolution; they linger in unresolved states, loops, and edits. These works are not so much completed as they are lived with, revised, and revised again.
Drawing from queer theory, gesture, and a material obsession with oil paint, DesRoches approaches the canvas as a site of movement, memory, and perpetual becoming. Pieces like Loose Knot, and Sinking evoke embodied unease—brush strokes caught mid-motion, thoughts half-formed. She paints like someone trying to outpace their own thoughts, catching confidence mid-flinch. Despite the assertive scale and intense colour, these works are full of hesitation. DesRoches uses humour and dramatic titles like Bite me, to flip perceived weakness into postures of power. Her turn to large scale is less about assertion and more about endurance, a material strategy for holding space when identity feels most unstable.
The paintings are not just images; they’re accumulations of moods, decisions, and contradictions. The result is a practice rooted in the “in-between”— coherence and collapse. This is not work that asks to be solved. It invites you to get lost in the tangle; to follow the line until it breaks, then find your way back.
This work was created with the support of the Visual Arts Creation Projects grant through the Ontario Arts Council and Government of Ontario.
