Bag, curated by Elly Reitman

Bag, installation view

Kyle Alden Martens, Shelled Blades, 2024
Silk, thread, wool, tie clips, aluminum

Kyle Alden Martens,Shelled Blades, 2024
Silk, thread, wool, tie clips, aluminum

Kyle Alden Martens,Shelled Blades, detail

Justine Chambers, Score for See Where You Are, 2025
Second hand shirts, silkscreen ink
Edition of 23

Justine Chambers, Score for See Where You Are, 2025
Second hand shirts, silkscreen ink
Edition of 23

Bag, installation view

Kern Samuel, Shroud of Suspended Absence, 2025
Pieced cotton bedsheet stained with orange algae

Kern Samuel, Shroud of Suspended Absence, detail

Kern Samuel, Shroud of Suspended Absence, detail

Kyle Alden Martens, Clock Collars, 2025
Silk, thread, leather, watch faces, aluminum

Kyle Alden Martens, Clock Collars, 2025
Silk, thread, leather, watch faces, aluminum

Kern Samuel, MrMr, 2025
Artist’s socks, welded steel support

Kern Samuel, MrMr, detail

Bag, installation view

Elly Reitman, ♡, 2022
Watercolour on paper

Justine Chambers (with Elly Reitman), See Where You Are, 2025
Performance, run time ~11 minutes

Justine Chambers (with Elly Reitman), See Where You Are, 2025
Performance, run time ~11 minutes

Justine Chambers (with Elly Reitman), See Where You Are, 2025
Performance, run time ~11 minutes

Bag
Justine A. Chambers, Kyle Alden Martens, Kern Samuel
Curated by Elly Reitman
September 19 - October 26, 2025

Kyle Alden Martens’ piece Shelled Blades consists of 14 elongated silk neckties (approximately 12 feet long), in four different styles, two parallel rows, draped across aluminum rods. The repetition and staggered composition has internal rhythm and structure, like a sentence or a looping memory. At the entrance of the gallery is Clock Collars, three gray collars in a line, with extended plackets, like a trio in a queue. In place of buttons, Martens has sewn watch faces on both sides, omitting buttonholes. These works are sensual, touchable, a bit diva, a visual articulation of nostalgia and altered temporality, dimensions literally stretched.

Justine A. Chambers' choreographic score for See Where You Are is printed on the inward and outward facing shirtbacks of second hand tops, broadcasting outward or dorsally caressing the wearer’s body. This piece will be performed by my body, on the evening this exhibition opens, the printed score both a poetic invitation and trace of the dance. See Where You Are is an excerpt of an extended conversation between Justine and I about clothing and beauty, about our lives, about draping, closures, opening, openness, closedness, conflict, compromise, flexibility, rigidity, interiority, exteriority, thresholds, polarity.

Kern Samuel’s Shroud of Suspended Absence hangs at the rear of the gallery, a repetition of tessellated shapes, their silhouettes derived from his deconstructed boxer briefs, puzzled together to form something resembling hide. There’s a clear and elegant logic for how these shapes come together through stitching, fusing, inlay, further complicated by three empty stirrup-like holes which droop at the bottom of the piece. In MrMr, two pairs of his socks are split and sutured together, stretched across a welded steel X, its surface rusty with welds raised like keloid scars. Kern’s work is both subtle and emotionally charged; permanent and decisive syntax between materials and forms, moments of tension and slack, colour and pattern achieved both on the surface of materials and imbued within them.

Cloth has the ability to orient feeling and behavior, expressing something internal outwardly, or inversely affecting the way we feel on the inside, movement and change initiated by cloth and its relationship to our bodies.

The feeling in the formal.

★

Justine A. Chambers is a dance artist and educator living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations in Vancouver, Canada. Her practice is a collaboration with her Black matrilineal heritage, and extends from this continuum and its entanglements with Western contemporary dance and visual arts practices. At the centre of her practice is a question often posed by her grandmother: “You feel me?” This question is both a declaration of one’s personal orientation, and an invitation to reorient and include what is held in our flesh. Chambers meets this question in her work by attending to individual and collective embodied archives, social choreographies of the everyday, and choreography/dance as otherwise ways of being in relation. Chambers’ work has been hosted at galleries, festivals, and theaters nationally and internationally including Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Troy, NY; Toronto Biennial of Art, Toronto, ON; Libby Leshgold Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Montreal, QC; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Sophiensaele, Berlin, Germany; National Arts Centre, Ottawa, ON; Agora de la Danse, Montreal, QC; Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford, PA; Artspeak, Vancouver, BC; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Western Front, Vancouver, BC; The Dance Centre, Vancouver, BC; Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver, BC; and the Hong Kong Arts Festival. Chambers holds a MFA in Interdisciplinary Art and is currently Assistant Professor in Dance at the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, and Associate Artist to The Dance Centre, Vancouver, BC. Chambers is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.

Kyle Alden Martens (b. Saskatchewan) is an artist who works through sculpture, installation, performance, and video. In their practice they construct sculptural work that engages with ideas of how clothing is tailored to fit the body while repositioning queerness to disrupt symbolic and physical structures. Martens holds an MFA in Sculpture from Concordia University and a BFA in Intermedia from NSCAD University. Their practice has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, CLAQ, the Dale and Nick Tedeschi Arts Fellowship, SSHRC, and FRQSC. Their work has been shown in exhibitions and fairs across Canada and North America, including Centre Clark, Bradley Ertaskiran, Pangée, Circa Art Actuel, the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (Montreal), the Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax), Stride Gallery (Calgary), Eastern Edge Gallery (St John’s), Barely Fair (Chicago), Nada Foreland (Catskill), Feria Material (Mexico City), and Patel Brown (Montreal & Toronto). Martens has been a resident at Acre Residency, Daïmôn Centre, and the Brucebo Fine Art Residency in Sweden among others. Martens is a recent laureate of the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art hosted at Concordia University. Recent projects include a group exhibition titled "The Past Tense is Always Longer" curated by Anaïs Castro and a duo exhibition titled “your voice, my throat” alongside artist B. Brookbank curated by Luther Konadu. Martens is represented by Patel Brown and based in Montreal.

Kern Samuel (b. 1990, Mount Hope, Trinidad and Tobago) is an artist living and working on the East Coast. He received his BFA from Cooper Union and his MFA from the Yale School of Art. His practice explores the formal, material, and conceptual language of painting through techniques such as sewing, dyeing, collage, and drawing. Leaning toward abstraction and text, his work engages with the symbolic and subjective dimensions of aesthetic experience, often emerging through personal and everyday materials. Samuel is represented by Derosia in New York City.

Elly Reitman (b. 1990) received a BFA from The Cooper Union, MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, and diplomas in TCM Acupressure and Naturopathy at École Setsuko. Reitman’s practice is concerned with the human body in its physical and metaphysical dimensions, investigating where and how trauma lives in both tissues and spirit. Their work has been included in exhibitions at Joe Project, The Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Rumpelstilskin, White Columns, Romance and Bad Water. Reitman is an artist, curator and bodyworker living as a guest on unceded Indigenous lands in Tioh’tià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal

Justine A. Chambers, Kyle Alden Martens & Kern Samuel
Bag, curated by Elly Reitman
September 19 - October 26, 2025

Ellie Rae Hunter
Heel
August 1 - September 10, 2025

Adi Blaustein Rejto
The Possibilites of Apples
April 12 - May 28, 2025

Adrienne Herr
4 possible endings that are so happy they make you cry

March 14- April 5, 2025

Audrey Gair
Rind

November 22, 2024 - January 4, 2025

Phyllis Baldino, Max Guy & Ellie Rae Hunter
Outliners
October 4 - November 10, 2024

Elly Reitman
energy
August 16 - September 20, 2024

Michelle Grabner, Kathleen Morris & Bronson Smillie
The Weather, or some other accident, curated by Danica Pinteric
July 12 - July 29, 2024

Tiziana La Melia
Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster
June 7 - July 6, 2024

Jacob Jackmauh, Caitlin McCann & Benjamin Stallings
As for me, I’m just passing through this planet
March 8 - April 14, 2024

Irina Jasnowski Pascual
Wipers
September 15 - October 29, 2023

Coco Klockner
honesty
July 8 - August 6, 2023

Morgan Canavan, Ben Estes, Marisa Takal
More Coming Back & More Returning
May 5 - June 11, 2023

Sylvie Hayes-Wallace
Center of the Universe
August 5 - September 18, 2022

Amanda Horowitz
Bad Water, True West or Between Myself the Crickets and the Coyote
performed by Sophia Cleary and Ada Friedman
July 14 & July 15, 2022

Suzanna Zak
Coming Home to the Ice Age
opening May 13 - June 24, 2022

★

About
Instagram

★

open by appointment

located beside
320 E. Churchwell Ave
Knoxville, Tennessee

Adrienne Herr 4 possible endings that are so happy they make you cry March 14- April 5, 2025

November 22, 2024 - January 4, 2025

Michelle Grabner, Kathleen Morris & Bronson Smillie The Weather, or some other accident, curated by Danica PintericJuly 12 - July 29, 2024 Tiziana La Melia Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster June 7 - July 6, 2024

★ About Instagram ★open by appointment located beside320 E. Churchwell Ave Knoxville, Tennessee

Adrienne Herr
4 possible endings that are so happy they make you cry

March 14- April 5, 2025

Michelle Grabner, Kathleen Morris & Bronson Smillie
The Weather, or some other accident, curated by Danica Pinteric
July 12 - July 29, 2024

Tiziana La Melia
Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster
June 7 - July 6, 2024

★

About
Instagram

★

open by appointment

located beside
320 E. Churchwell Ave
Knoxville, Tennessee