The works of Los Angeles-based artist Charlotte Zhang are inscribed with the histories of petty criminals, rogues, ruffians, and indeed tireslashers (her contemporary variant on labels found as far back as Elizabethan Era moralizing rogue pamphlets). Such outlaws, she observes, both threaten the very idea of property/propriety that define upright members of society, and they personify the fantasy of individualism and heroic citizenship. The most powerful actors in the system (politicians, law enforcement) take pleasure in styling themselves after the very same people whom they criminalize and subjugate. The rogue is both damned and heroized. The coney and the coney catcher are two sides of the same coin.

For her first solo exhibition in Canada, Zhang combines Bloodsport/Playground Rules (2023—ongoing), a series of sculptures crafted from public bench dividers (engineered to prevent people lying down); together with Rogue Pamphlets (2025—ongoing), a new series of hand-sewn collages, printed on variously textured fabrics using the sublimation dye technique. The effect is rich in colour, evoking Tudor tapestries and Baroque paintings, and intricately coded with survival tactics for now and tomorrow.

An artist who moulds language as deftly as any tangible material, Zhang’s chosen vocabulary of sumptuary law, colonial bandits, ‘degenerate’ Others, effacement, disguise, disappearance, and the mythical Ring of Gyges makes imaginative links across five centuries of civic strife. These terms are also interwoven into her first feature film, Tycoon, which the artist describes as “a deconstructed hard-boiled mystery about two young grifters coming of age against the backdrop of a near-future Los Angeles, marred by Olympics turmoil and cockroach conspiracies.”

Produced with support from The Canada Council for the Arts, Model City Auto, and The Polygon Gallery, Tycoon will have its gallery premiere in February 2026, as part of this exhibition’s public programming.

Opening Celebration on Thursday, November 27

About the Artist
Born in 1999 and based in British Columbia until moving to Los Angeles to pursue studies at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Charlotte Zhang was the 2021 winner of the Phillip B. Lind Prize for Emerging Artists at The Polygon Gallery. Her videos, collages, and sculptural work have since been shown internationally, including festival screenings in New York, Chicago, and Berlin. Recent solo and duo exhibitions include Paradise Holds Itself Shut at Goes to Ocean and Ordinary Disasters, Critical Mass (with Tania Collette B.) at Melrose Botanical Garden, both in Los Angeles in 2023. Group exhibitions include Cassandra Press: On Self-Defense – A Cassandra Press Reader In Action at Bergen Kunsthal in Bergen, Norway in 2022; and Scupper, guest curated by Carlos Agredano, at François Ghebaly in Los Angeles, CA, USA in 2024.

Curated by Monika Szewczyk, Audain Chief Curator

Generously supported by
The Lind Family
The Poseley Family

Media Partner
North Shore News

Banner Image: Charlotte Zhang, Explosive Breaching Frame (detail), 2025, 17' x 18' silicon edge graphic.