L.L. Contemporary is thrilled to announce its upcoming holiday group exhibition, What a Wonderful Year. This special showcase features works by a diverse group of collaborative artists, including Aimee Ruoff, Andrew Ooi, Dylan Darwin, Heather Goodchild, Keerthana Jhutty, Larry Muñoz, Leon Zheng, Mona Shen, Nava Waxman, Takuya Inoue and Zhan Zhang, alongside select pieces from the gallery’s collection by Airan Kang, Benjamin Appel, Christian Schoeler, David Urban, Emily Gaudet, Gina Rorai, Gordon Smith, Joseph Amar, Sarah Goldstein, Shih Chieh Huang, Steven Restagno and Susanna Heller. The gallery warmly invites everyone to take this opportunity to come together and celebrate the festive season.

About the Artists

Aimee Ruoff makes oil paintings, drawings, and hand-painted animations from her home studio in Vancouver, B.C. In her work she looks for small sublime moments within everyday life, focusing on what is fleeting and ethereal as a reminder of the temporality of life. This process of taking time to seek and translate what she sees into painting has become both an act of devotion and a quiet subversion of the pressing speed that defines our cultural moment.

Andrew Ooi (pronounced “o͞oē”) is a self-taught, Canadian visual artist. His principal medium is paper, which he manipulates to create abstract, geometric artworks examining ideas about art history, anthropology, identity and human behavior. These works have exhibited at art galleries and fairs in Canada and the US (including Toronto, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Miami); published in various media (Young Space, Artoronto.ca, Uppercase); and awarded multiple grants (Ontario and Toronto Arts Councils). However, as his interest in materials and applications becomes varied and conceptual, his practice has evolved toward installation and participatory art, exploring unconventional presentation and partnerships.

Dylan Darwin (b. 1995, Kitchener, Ontario) is a painter based in Hamilton. He studied Illustration and Computer Animation at Sheridan College. Working primarily en plein air, he aims to explore the shifting qualities of light and space, delving into themes of impermanence and liminality.

Heather Goodchild (b.1977) is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist exhibiting since 2001. Working across media including painting, textile, ceramic and installation, she explores themes including symbolism, ritual, morality, and the collapse of the hierarchy of artistic disciplines. Her practice highlights the integration of craft into a contemporary art context, most notably through her work using the folk technique of rug hooking.

Goodchild most recently exhibited as part of the Virginia McClure Ceramic Biennial, Montreal (2024), at AYE Gallery, Beijing (2023), LL Contemporary, Richmond Hill (2023), IA&A at Hillyer, Washington, DC (2022), and at Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto, ON (2022). She received the Chalmers Arts Fellowship in 2019, was the Artist in Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2012 and has attended the Varda Artists Residence program (California), the Skopelos Foundation for the Arts (Greece) the Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris) and the Tao Hua Tan Residency (China).

Keerthana Jhutty was born and raised in Chennai, India, and immigrated to Toronto in 2013. She currently resides in Strathmore, Alberta. Her compositions are inspired by Tagore’s verses about missing the day a lotus bloomed and Nehru’s iconic 1947 Tryst with Destiny speech. Jhutty’s work reflects her deep connection to poetry, classical Indian literature, and fading memories of her childhood in India and her ancestors. Locales such as the deer forests of the Kalakshetra Foundation, the banyans of the Theosophical Society, and a secret path to a childhood playground often feature in her works. She has participated in various art fairs, auctions, and juried exhibitions, including the Scarborough Annual Juried Exhibition and the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair. Her work has been featured on CBC and will also be included in an upcoming book documenting the stories of emerging Canadian artists.

Larry Muñoz (b. 1982, Colombia) lives and works between Bogotá, Colombia, and Mexico City, Mexico. He studied Advertising at Jorge Tadeo Lozano University in Bogotá. Artistic residencies have played a pivotal role in his development, including the Platform 82 project, hosted by Zilberman Gallery in Berlin in 2024, and the Taohuatan International Artist Residency in Anhui Province, China, in 2023. His work has been exhibited in Turkey, Mexico, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, the United States, and Colombia. Notable solo exhibitions include Plural Nodo Cultural in Bogotá, Muntref Ecoparque in Buenos Aires, Beta Gallery in Bogotá, and Jardim do Hermes in São Paulo.

Muñoz’s work explores our relationship with the natural world. Through sculptures, videos, and installations, he combines organic and industrial materials from diverse sources, focusing on small details like flowers, seeds, stones, and insects. His practice examines how our interactions with nature are mediated and defined by media, technology, science, politics, and other structures, highlighting the materiality and fragility of the world around us.

Leon Zheng is a contemporary artist based in Toronto. He studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in China and OCAD University in Canada. His art delves into themes of sensation, with love and loneliness as central motifs, capturing their essence through brushwork and emotive compositions. Zheng’s work reflects a deep connection to the complexities of inner life, offering viewers an evocative perspective on universal emotions.

Mona Shen (b. 1992) grew up in South-East China. She studied in US and achieved her MFA in Painting from New York Studio School (2018) and her BFA in Fine Arts from Columbus College of Art & Design (2015). Her work has been shown and featured through Young Space, Art Maze Magazine, Create Magazine, Bowery Gallery, Living Gallery Outpost and Space Earth Canal 321. She has participated in programs including the Emerging Artist Program at Millersville University (EAR), Mount Gretna School of Art (MGSoA), and Visual Arts program at the Chautauqua Institution (VACI). Shen currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Nava Waxman is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice explores questions of identity, memory transmission, language, and the complex dynamic of belonging. Working across diverse media including painting, drawing, moving image, performances, photographs and installations, she investigates subjects like cultural hybridity, diasporic subjectivity, and archives, often through performative gestures, embodied actions, rituals, enactment, ceremonies, and experimental collaborative explorations. She positions the body as a critical site of conceptual and material inquiry, examining its role as a repository of displacement narratives, exploring its inherent archival liveness, and the fragmentary nature of personal and collective memory.

She is the recipient of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Joseph-Armand Bombardier Scholarship (SSHRC) and has received multiple grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Nava holds an MFA in Visual Arts from York University, where she is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Visual Arts. Her work has been presented both locally and internationally. Recent projects include Assembly of Repair (2024), Shared-View (2022), Variations on Broken Lines (2020), and Mobiux (2020–2023).

Takuya Inoue (b. 1993) is a Japanese painter who received his B.F.A. from the University of Tsukuba’s School of Art and Design in 2018 and an M.F.A. in Oil Painting from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2019. His work seeks to capture the “universality” found in various phenomena, including nature and humanity. As part of his creative process, he actively explores different locations in his daily life. By immersing himself in local cultures, climates, people, and landscapes, he allows his thoughts, values, and emotions to evolve, with these transformations serving as inspiration for his work. Simultaneously, he focuses on observing the constant, universal self that remains unchanged through these experiences. In recent years, his artwork has featured abstract portraits of people holding babies, symbolizing his exploration of change and constancy. Past exhibitions, such as “STRIKE ME PINK!” (Japan, 2018) and “Me?” (Japan, 2021), have included installations that use natural light to emphasize enduring elements amid the passage of time. In 2024, Inoue held a solo exhibition titled “Same” at Megafield Art Space in Beijing. His artistic practice has been supported by cultural grants from the Ishibashi Foundation (2019) and the Nomura Foundation (2021). These opportunities have arisen through connections he has formed with individuals in the various locations he has explored.

Zhan Zhang is a Toronto-based mixed-media artist known for her freehand paper-cutting sculptures that have an elegant and otherworldly quality to them. Using scissors to draw, the artist creates installation, video and paper-based works to explore the multiple facets of her identity formulated by her immigration to Canada and youth years in China.

Zhang graduated from the University of Toronto with two Honors B.A. majors in Visual Arts and Arts Management, and 3D Animation Post Graduate Degree from Seneca College. Her early works portray mythical creatures and plants, reflecting her interest in the natural world and keen observation of organic beauty. In recent years, Zhang’s sculptures have evolved into conceptual art with Asian mythological references that depict visually transformative structures, in which the structures and systems are fragile, and each cutting line seemingly appears and disappears. In her art scenes, the animals, plants and people are all intertwined, and the laws of the real world are absent, which allows viewers to see bizarre inner views the artist found within herself.