Opening Exhibition: Small Talk by Miles Ingrassia

Through large-scale figurative oil paintings, Miles Ingrassia depicts young men gathered in the familiar rituals of intimacy and leisure
About this Event

In Small Talk, ordinary moments of social life become sites of quiet emotional uncertainty. Through large-scale figurative oil paintings, Miles Ingrassia depicts young men gathered in the familiar rituals of intimacy and leisure: piled together on a couch, sharing a drink, waiting outside a club, or tending to one another through a haircut. These scenes are unremarkable at first glance, yet within them, small gestures begin to carry a weight that exceeds their apparent significance. Bodies press together, hands linger, and glances are exchanged or withheld. The paintings attend to the moments when closeness comes naturally, but meaning remains uncertain.

Ingrassia’s work explores the contradictions of contemporary masculinity, particularly the ways intimacy is negotiated through gestures that can appear as casual, playful, or indifferent. Touch becomes both an expression of affection and a means of disguising it; proximity offers a form of connection without requiring anything to be named. Within these encounters, the boundaries between friendship and desire, tenderness and restraint, begin to blur. These paintings occupy an ambiguous space in which masculine intimacy is neither fully concealed nor entirely revealed.

The scenes emerge from an archive of photographs collected throughout everyday life, reworked through staged compositions that merge observed moments with reconstructed gestures. In this process, the images become less concerned with documenting a particular event than with capturing the feeling of remembering one. Familiar scenes acquire an intensified emotional charge, as recollection embellishes what was once ordinary and longing gives significance to what might otherwise have passed unnoticed. The resulting paintings hover between memory and invention, their subjects suspended in a past that feels intimate yet increasingly difficult to grasp.

This slippage between presence and recollection is carried through the paintings’ materiality. Saturated colours and deep shadows heighten the atmosphere of each scene, while loose, unresolved passages of paint allow figures to dissolve into their surroundings. Details emerge with striking immediacy before slipping back into ambiguity, echoing the uneven clarity of memory itself.

The title Small Talk refers to the familiar exchanges that fill our social lives; the conversations, gestures, and fleeting encounters through which we pass time together. Beneath these seemingly inconsequential moments, however, something remains unspoken. A glance over a shoulder, the pressure of fingers against another’s skin, the shared space of a couch or a glass held between several bodies. Each becomes an invitation to consider what intimacy might contain beyond what can be openly expressed. Rather than resolve these uncertainties, Ingrassia’s paintings linger in the space between familiarity and longing, where the smallest gestures can hold the possibility of something more.

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Details:

Date: Wed, Nov 11, 2026
Hours: 7pm - late
Address: 1611 Dundas St W
🎟️ Free RSVP and/or Pay What You Can

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investigates contemporary masculinity and the contradictions within its performance; how tenderness, aggression, desire, and shame coexist beneath inherited cultural norms. Through large-scale figurative oil paintings, he explores the social and emotional terrain of young men navigating identity and intimacy within a cultural framework that often discourages emotional fluency.

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