Rhea Dillon at COOPER COLE, Toronto

What poetry allows is the removal of parts of speech so that a life may make sense to itself.

How to lift traces to lines, to tangibility full of traces that have been erased by regimes of governance or regimes of power? 

So, where I find myself located as trace, trace becomes vocabulary.

An edited trace from Brand, Dionne. “Pressure on Verbal Matter: Dionne Brand and the Making of Language”. Interview by Robert Enright. Border Crossings Magazine, November 2020.

COOPER COLE is pleased to present Traces, a solo exhibition by Rhea Dillon. This marks the artists first solo exhibition with the gallery and in Canada.

Opening reception: Thursday, May 21, 6-8pm

Rhea Dillon (b. 1996, London, UK), is an artist, writer and poet.

Select recent solo and group exhibitions include “Heads” at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, NYC; “DFT 2025” at Wesleyan University, Connecticut; “Gestural Poethics” at Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany; “Accumulation – On Collecting, Growth and Excess”, at The Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich; “Fractal Being” at Cordova, Barcelona; “Air de Repos (Breathwork)” at Capc Bordeaux, France; “Tituba, qui pour nous protéger?” at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; “Each now, is the time, the space” at Lismore Castle Arts, Ireland; and “The Black Fold” at Kunstverein Kevin Space, Vienna.

Dillon was an Elaine G. Weitzen Studio Program Fellow at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program 2024/2025 in New York. She was also awarded the 2025 Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel. For 2024, she was the guest editor of the Interjection Calendar for Montez Press. Dillon’s first institutional solo exhibition ‘An Alterable Terrain’ was held at Tate Britain in 2023-4 as part of the Art Now series. To accompany this, a book of the same title was edited by her and published by Tate in 2024. In 2021 the artist presented “Catgut – The Opera” as part of Park Nights at the Serpentine Pavilion, and a publication of the same title was published in 2023 by Worms Publishing. Dillon lives and works between London, UK and New York, USA.