Exhibition runs: November 13 - November 25, 2026
Opening: November 13
Planted Light brings together three painters who pay close attention to the living world. Each looks at it from a different distance: the forest, the table and the cell. Across those distances, all three treat light as something that grows, roots and gathers in what it touches.
Emily Phillips
Emily Phillips paints the forests of New Brunswick's Fundy region, which she has called home since 2010. Her oil paintings break the woods into bright patches of colour: fern, moss, streambed and canopy, lit by sun moving through the trees. Phillips trained in environmental science before she trained in painting, and her work comes from a wish to help viewers feel the wonder she finds in these places, and the urge to protect them.
Meghan McKnight
Meghan McKnight works at the opposite scale. The Toronto-based artist describes her practice as a kind of mimicry, an often unconscious urge to copy and abstract nature's order and processes. Her watercolours are full of seed-like forms, honeycomb lattices, tendrils and pods. They could be cells under a microscope or planets with their own rules. In her acrylic works, she builds the paint up into something you can almost touch. She lays the ground down in thick, scale-like strokes, then raises small beads and threads of acrylic paint from it, so the surface looks embroidered, beaded or grown. Up close, these pieces pull the eye in the way touch would. McKnight holds "wildness and order in tandem," and her work invites the same curiosity that made it.
Erica Beyea
Erica Beyea works in the middle distance of everyday life. Starting from personal photographs, she paints quiet moments of connection: a hand resting on a sleeping dog, arms crossed and held, flowers on a cluttered table in late light. Her new series of paintings of hands, supported by the Canada Council for the. Arts, looks at touch as the most direct way we hold onto one another. Beyea uses colour to bring memory back to life, moving between likeness and abstraction to catch what a photograph can't.
About the Exhibition
Shown together, the works echo one another. A fern in Phillips' forest becomes a leaf under Beyea's fingers, then breaks into one of McKnight's spores. A sunlit clearing has its match in a sunlit kitchen. McKnight's raised surfaces and Beyea's painted hands both invite touch: one through texture, the other through what it shows. The three artists also come at the idea of being "planted" from different places. Phillips put down roots in New Brunswick after moving north from Maryland. McKnight works from Toronto, but has a lifelong connection to Prince Edward Island. Beyea grew up in New Brunswick, spent half of her life in Toronto and now lives in Spain. Their paintings ask what it means to belong somewhere, and to stay long enough to really see the light there.
Visit the Exhibition
Join us at Wallack Galleries for the opening reception on Friday, November 13, from 6 PM to 8 PM, and explore the work of these artists.
Wallack Galleries
305 Bank Street, Second Floor
Ottawa, Ontario