Behind the Curtain
Ft. Kelly Grace, Andrew Beck, Elle Chae, and Jay Li
May 1 - 17

Opening Reception: Thursday, May 1 @ 5 - 7 pm
RSVP your attendance to responses@wallspacegallery.ca

Presales open Thursday, April 24 at 10 am, in-person, online, and over the phone at 613-729-0003. Please contact the gallery if you'd like to view the works in-person.

Wall Space Gallery is proud to present Behind the Curtain, a group exhibition of paintings by Andrew Beck, Elle Chae, Kelly Grace and Jay Li. The artists in Behind the Curtain construct worlds through the collapse of linear time, combining past eras or moments from personal archives in snapshots of layered imagery that capture the stretching and tidal current of time in motion.

Behind the Curtain | Collection

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Kelly Grace and Andrew Beck’s film and television inspired paintings use cinematic cultural references as grounding points for exploring reality creation and the suspension of disbelief.

Grace’s process begins with staging the models she photographs and paints; collecting vintage props and designing their ‘character’ through hairstyling and costume design. Appearing like an alternate universe where multiple eras have collided, her figures are immersed in hints of storylines that remain captained by our imagination. In her painting process she builds up layer upon layer of glazed paint, sanding back into segments until her figures exist in weathered atmospheres reminiscent of old photographs or video stills. Grace toes the line between reality and fiction in both her subject matter and approach to her materials.

Andrew Beck’s scenes cobble together multiple reference photos from movie stills, art history, and the wide index of internet images. Often times, unless well acquainted with their source origins, their popular culture ties remain intentionally subtle, overpowered by the atmospheres created by Beck. Narrative is not a concern for Beck, instead he uses the odd relationships he forges between visual imagery to touch on the uncanny – a déjà vu that we can’t quite place.

His worlds appear to have a slick filter placed over them, their environments tinted in seductive phatlo and viridian greens, for an added touch of the un-real. Beck is unconcerned with the stories we create looking at his pieces. What enthralls him is the painter’s ability to reshape shared visual culture into something entirely new and vaguely voyeuristic, like taking on the first-person perspective in a dream.

  • Andrew Beck

    Filtered 
    oil on canvas
    40 x 48 in.
    Framed by Wall Space

  • Andrew Beck

    Wanderers
    oil on canvas
    24 x 18 in.
    Framed by Wall Space

Elle Chae’s figures exist in spaces in a constant state of becoming, their bodies caught in the fragmentation of visual planes and swarming with the coalescence of the botanical, interior spaces of the home, and moments documented from the artist’s daily life.

Recently, Chae has been looking to the natural cycles of plant regeneration as a metaphor for the inescapable presence of decay within the process of growth. Her fluid forms flicker into existence, unsteady against the underlying current of movement present in her build-up of intuitive responses to previous marks.

In Chae’s “Tomorrow Is A Mystery”, the artist’s quasi self-portrait applies a brush to the leg of her subject with such delicacy that the intimacy is palpable.



  • Elle Chae, All These Years
    Mixed media and oil on wood,
    48 x 60 in.
    Framed by Wall Space

  • Elle Chae, Don't Remember Where it All Came From
    mixed media and oil on wood
    48 x 60 in.

Similarly, in “Painting in the Old Factory”, Jay Li paints himself as the focal point of a fish-eye perspective. His surroundings a flurry of colour and lines that temporarily adhere to one another in hints of spatial definition before they collapse again. Chae and Li place importance on the process of painting as a means of synthesizing the experience of reality through perceptions of time and change.

Jay Li’s renderings of vintage machines such as typewriters and cameras dissolve the structure of these mechanisms into abstract lines and patchworks of vibrational colour. The image of the vintage mechanism barely clings to recognition.

Beck, Chae, Grace and Li pull the curtain of storytelling aside to focus on the act of creation itself, balancing illusion and reality through their respective use of cinematic influences or the imaginative
possibilities within painting. Their subject matter becomes almost secondary to the teasing apart and refashioning of cultural and personal references through the act of painting. They place us within environments of uncertainty, offering glimpses of stories and settings that shift continually under our feet. The ambiguity of their context lets their painted subject matter – whether figures, self-portraits, cinematic cultural references, or the aged machines of our past – become about representing the malleable space of imagination.

The artists in Behind the Curtain reveal the ways in which we are drawn to creating meaning through visual imagery, and subsequently, painting’s ability to question the solidity of the structures underlying that meaning. Each uses the malleable constructs of time, cultural memory, and personal experience to grasp the slippery threads of reality, if only for a moment.

- Tiffany April, Curator

About the artists

Kelly Grace grew up amidst the quiet beauty of the countryside of Stouffville, Ontario. Now living in the vibrant energy of the city of Toronto where her studio practice is thriving. With roots steeped in a creative family of makers, art has always been a part of her world. With this deep-rooted connection to the arts she blends her rural roots with urban influences to channel her love of storytelling into cinema-inspired paintings that blend nostalgia with a modern edge.

Andrew Beck is a British born painter now living and working in Ottawa, ON. After a career spanning illustration, graphic design and game development, he became a full-time artist upon emigrating to Canada in 2016. His paintings are fragments of stories that never fully resolve, leaving a sensation of uncertainty. Becks’ work has been exhibited in galleries throughout the UK, Germany and Canada and is held in collections worldwide.

Elle Chae is an Ottawa-based artist born in South Korea. Chae obtained her BFA in 2011 and MFA in 2016 from the University of Ottawa. After her graduation, she volunteered and taught arts at the Korean Community School in Ottawa. Her work has been exhibited in Ottawa, Montréal, and California. For Chae, the painting process's transient state creates a sense of vulnerability, futility, and continuity in the work. The result is open to interpretation, inviting viewers to contemplate the cycles of action and consequences, hoping to spark a dialogue about the transformative reality of the visual world.

Jay Li was born in Guangzhou, China. He graduated from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. From 1985-1989 he taught at the Fine Art Teachers College of Canton. From 1989 -1998 he travelled around Europe and Australia to study and develop his oil painting. In 1998 he moved to Canada and now resides in Ottawa. His major works: "Jazz mood", "21st Century Ark Series", "cafe", "Still Life" and "old typewriter" were collected in Canada, the United States, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Greece, Australia, Japan, Germany, Dubai, and China.