Hangama Amiri & Melissa Joseph at COOPER COLE, Toronto

COOPER COLE is pleased to present Gathering, a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Hangama Amiri and Melissa Joseph.

Through fibre, cloth, and the intimacy of handwork, both artists trace the ways memory lingers – how it clings to fabric, how it eases with time, how it sharpens like the first taste of something long forgotten.

Across the works presented in this exhibition, food appears as both subject and symbol—a conduit for memory, a site of intimacy, a language of belonging. Joseph’s felted compositions soften archival images of family memories related to shared meals, transforming them into dreamlike impressions of family, diaspora, and time’s quiet erosion. Amiri’s sewn textiles reconstruct intimate scenes of dining tables, celebrating spaces where cultural identity is prepared, consumed, and passed down. In her works, food is both nourishment and nostalgia, a reminder of places left behind and those reimagined in new lands.

Working across felting, quilting, and stitched compositions, Amiri and Joseph translate personal and collective histories into tactile landscapes. Dissolving the boundaries between past and present, evoking the fragility of memory and the tenderness of its recall. Both artists create artworks which construct fragmented geographies, where domestic and cultural spaces are stitched together like remnants of a life in motion. Theirs is a language of touch. Through the slow gestures of making—pressing fiber, pulling thread, assembling cloth— Amiri and Joseph preserve moments otherwise ephemeral. Like recipes passed down in family kitchens, both artists’ works hold the textures of home, migration, and longing, carrying forward the imprint of what was.

Gathering is an ode to the ways we inherit and reconstruct our pasts, where recollection is something not just remembered, but experienced through all our senses.

Hangama Amiri (b. 1989, Peshawar, Afghanistan) works predominantly in textile to create images that reflect on ideas of home. Using a painterly approach to colour and materials, Amiri reflects on how everyday objects are imbued with cultural memory. Amiri holds an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was a Canadian Fulbright and Post-Graduate Fellow at Yale University School of Art and Sciences, and has completed residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, Joya AiR Residency Program in Almería, Spain, World of CO Residency program in Sofia, Bulgaria, and at Long Road Projects in Jacksonville, Florida. Amiri won the 2011 Lieutenant Governor’s Community Volunteerism Award and the 2013 Portia White Protege Award.

She has exhibited internationally at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield; Hayy Jameel, Jeddah; Aga Khan Museum, Cooper Cole, Toronto; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; The Moody Centre for the Arts, Houston; Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa; Carl Kostyál, Hospitalet, Stockholm; Mönchehaus Museum; Goslar; Sharjah Biennial 15, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; Sevil Dolmaci Gallery, Istanbul; Kunstraum Potsdam, Potsdam; Fondazione Imago Mundi, Treviso; Villa Panza, Varese; T293 Gallery, Rome; New Museum, Albertz Benda, Charles Moffett Gallery, New York; Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, Banff; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; and Paramo Gallery, Guadalajara; among others. Amiri lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut, USA. Her work is in permanent collections museums including the RBC Corporate Collection (Toronto), Denver Art Museum (Denver), Nova Scotia Art Bank (Nova Scotia), and the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa). Amiri currently lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut, USA.