Working primarily with oil paint, Natia Lemay's canvases pull the viewer into portals of memory, rendering tactility and permanence to the transitory nature of environments inhabited throughout her childhood. Her subjects reflect early experiences with addiction, violence, and erasure, alongside intersections of race, gender, and ancestry. The textural gestures of the artist’s brush (at times integrated with acrylic, graphite, marker, and charcoal) bring out shadows and highlights that allow us to distinguish fragments, which serve to highlight the relationship between Lemay’s human figures and the dense, abstract, uncertain spaces of emotion that they inhabit.
Through the cultivation of fragmented memories, Natia Lemay harnesses her interdisciplinary practice to address the expansiveness of conditions under which IBPOC people live. Drawing on lived experiences, she explores semiotic, philosophical, and socio-psychological themes of visibility, orientation, and consciousness to untangle how the body and mind interact with space and shift through time. Through careful worldbuilding and storytelling, she aims to create a visual vocabulary that makes the invisible visible, articulates the indescribable, and creates space for reflection without prejudice.
In addition to works on canvas, Lemay continues to explore soapstone carving throughout her practice — a uniquely fragile material with traditional ties to various West African and Indigenous cultures. Through stacking miniature stone renderings of chairs, sofas, and rocking horses, the artist reconfigures the spaces of her childhood through object association. The precarious physicality of each stone sculpture, alongside the labor-intensive method of their assembly, emphasizes Lemay’s unsettled feelings of both metaphorical and literal dispossession.
Natia Lemay (b. 1985 in Toronto, Ontario) was raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and is based in Toronto, ON. Recent solo exhibitions include Manqué Melancholia at Galerie Nicolas Robert, Toronto, ON, and Nineteen Eighty-Four at Yossi Milo Gallery, NYC, NY. Lemay was selected for the 2024 Fountainhead Residency in Miami and the 2022 Royal Drawing School Residency in Dumfries, Scotland. She was awarded the Northern Trust Purchase Prize at EXPO Chicago 2024, with her work acquired by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA. She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art (2023) and a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design (2021) with a minor in Social Sciences.