MONTREAL.- Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran is presenting TOUCH SCREEN, an exhibition organized by Julia Dault and Brian Sholis which brings together artists whose works evoke partitions, scrims, and portals. The artworks presented here seem to push back and forth across thresholds, but the screens they evoke are anything but those of our electronic devices. Instead, materials and close observation—of the world, of mark-making—are gateways to form and meaning.

The artists share compositional strategies and conceptual foundations—often across mediums. Ruby Sky Stiler’s puzzle-like collages, which draw together fragments of language and pattern, echo in the shards of light scattered across a glassy skyscraper in Mårten Lange’s photograph Reflected Light. Jessica Eaton and Gerald Ferguson both use repetition to structure their compositions: her painstaking photographs layer image atop image to create a seamless whole; his stencilled canvases repurpose everyday objects like drain covers to make jagged arrangements.

Pattern is likewise important to both textile artist Molly Haynes and photographer Hannah Whitaker; each in her own way draws inspiration from thinking of punch-card Jacquard looms as structuring devices. Finally, Steven Beckly and Marie-Claire Blais both break the two-dimensional surfaces of their chosen mediums. Her slashed canvas updates both Frank Stella and Lucio Fontana; his photographs are viewed through screens or have appendages that dangle to the floor.

We think of networked screens as bringing forward worlds and spaces beyond what’s immediately in front of us. The artists in this exhibition, through their intricate craftsmanship and their play with thresholds, create objects that serve as both carriers and embodiment of meaning.