Shellie Zhang

Shellie Zhang is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. She is interested in exploring how integration, diversity and assimilation is implemented and negotiated, how this relates to lived experiences, how culture is learned, relearned and sustained, and how things are remembered and preserved.

Zhang’s photographic works present particularly selected objects that act as a kind of portrait of a particular place or experience. Her 2021 Smokestack Quarterly summer issue, A Trip to the Store, offered another opportunity for her to more deeply consider how “still life, which is often so removed from place, could be more representative or responsive to it.” Conceived as a still life ‘snapshot’ of the Parkdale neighbourhood in the summer where Zhang lives and works, all items included in the composition of this image were sourced from shops and related to experiences derived from the local scene. As she details:

The aloe was for some extra sun I got that week. The peppers were for a chili sauce I made. Grapes and pears were a fresh treat. The shell was something in my home that I thought made for a nice cornucopia presentation of my trip to the store.

Zhang has exhibited her work internationally at venues including WORKJAM (Beijing, China), Asian Art Initiative (Philadelphia, PA) and Gallery 44 (Toronto, ON). She is a member of EMILIA-AMALIA, a feminist reading and writing group and in 2017, was the Artist-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Zhang’s work has been published in Canadian Art, the Toronto Star, Blackflash Magazine, CBC Arts, and C Magazine. Recent and upcoming projects include exhibitions at Artspace (Peterborough, ON), Patel Gallery (Toronto, ON), AKA Artist-Run (Saskatoon,SK) and the Anchorage Museum (Anchorage, AK).