Montina Hussey

Montina Hussey is a force of curiousity and enthusiasm. A Metis artist, she was brought up in a large family of musicians and artists. She pursued a self directed practice in Florence Italy, is a graduate from OCAD University, and now fully settled in Toronto, she makes waves with solo and group shows, and unique collaborations. Montina’s approach to her work has always been an exploration of her vulnerability. She is a powerful emotional interpreter and is completely unabashed about revealing the shadows of one’s psyche. Her work in Italy centred around grotesque entangled monsters that contained her sexual trauma and appetite. By painting and scratching away at the memory of her grandparents, she explored epigenetic memory and intergenerational trauma, in her graduating thesis. Her paintings dance between figuration and abstraction, blur facts and crystallize detail equally, just as memory behaves. They explode with colour and movement and aggression as she wrestles with the fragments of self that are hard to put into words. She asks the viewer to surrender to the full play of what is ordinarily called the terror of the unknown. When you face these shadows, the self splinters, and an ecstatic sense of freedom erupts. Her practice is the stage between the unveiling and the freedom.