Iryna Merkulova | Peripheral Surfaces
March 7 – 21

Reception: March 7, 3–5 pm, Artist talk @ 3:45 pm
RSVP your attendance to responses@wallspacegallery.ca

Presales are open Saturday, Feb. 28 @ 10 am, online, in-person and via phone at 613-729-0003. If you would like to preview an artwork before collecting it, please contact the gallery at info@wallspacegallery.ca

Wall Space Gallery is excited to present Peripheral Surfaces, a solo exhibition by Montreal-based artist Iryna Merkulova in celebration of International Women's Month. In this series, Merkulova treats the storefront window not as a transparent boundary but as a charged surface where desire, access, and distance collide. Her paintings do not present the city as coherent or navigable. Instead, they concentrate on glass, signage, glare, and artificial light, the very elements that structure how we look and what we are permitted to see.

In Time, an ornate gilded clock sits behind a window crowded with chandeliers and carved figures. Gold ornament glows under artificial light, but reflection fractures the scene and destabilizes depth. The clock suggests permanence and authority, yet it is mediated through glare and surface. Its monumentality is theatrical. What appears solid is dependent on display. In Before the Dinner Service, red tablecloths and hanging lanterns promise warmth and hospitality, while broad green leaves press forward into the picture plane. The space feels lush and inviting, yet it remains inaccessible, filtered through reflective glass and horizontal streaks of light. The painting holds attraction and distance in the same frame.

Born in Kyiv and based in Montreal, Merkulova approaches urban space from a position shaped by movement and relocation. Reflection becomes more than a visual device. It becomes a condition of inhabiting the city without fully claiming it. Commercial surfaces dominate the field of vision, flattening architecture into image and transforming interiors into spectacle.

Across Peripheral Surfaces, the city emerges as layered, seductive, and unstable. Glass does not clarify but multiplies, and signage does not simply advertise but structures perception. Merkulova’s brushwork reinforces this instability, allowing forms to flicker between solidity and dissolution. These paintings locate urban life at the edge of visibility, where belonging is provisional and space is experienced through surface.


Curator
Haruka Toyoda

Featured work:
Time, Oil on canvas
Before the Dinner Service, Oil on canvas