From monumental public works to artwork made to live with, Ola Volo and Michelle Hoogveld bring two distinct visual worlds together at Gibson Fine Art.
Opening Night
Friday, September 25 · 6:00–9:00 PM
Artist Talk · 7:30 PM
Join us for cocktails, music by DJ Jon Delerious, and a brief conversation with Ola and Michelle. They’ll share stories from their creative journeys and the large-scale public projects that have taken their work around the world.
From Canvas to City Walls
Artist Conversation + Gallery Walkthrough
Saturday, September 26 · 1:00–3:00 PM
Join Ola Volo and Michelle Hoogveld for a conversation about what happens when an artist’s practice moves beyond the gallery wall. They’ll share how public-art opportunities came about, what changes at architectural scale, and the turning points that shaped their creative careers.
The conversation will be followed by audience questions and an informal gallery walkthrough with the artists.
Seating is limited. Advance registration recommended.
About the Exhibition
Blueprints of a Dream brings together two distinct visual languages: Ola Volo’s richly layered worlds of folklore, pattern and storytelling, and Michelle Hoogveld’s luminous geometric abstractions built through colour, rhythm and the arch.
Both artists move fluidly between intimate artwork and monumental public work. Ola’s practice spans original artwork, murals and international commissions for brands including Louis Vuitton, Lululemon and Starbucks. Michelle, who was born and raised in Calgary, has created major public works including a sixteen-storey mural in Montreal and commissioned sculptures for Brookfield Place in New York.
In Blueprints of a Dream, the scale and ambition of those practices return to the intimacy of the gallery. Pattern becomes architecture. Colour becomes space. Story and abstraction meet in artwork designed to be experienced up close and lived with.
Artist Statement | Ola Volo
Dreams are built slowly. They borrow fragments from memory, folklore, nature, and imagination until familiar things begin to transform into something entirely new.
Blueprints of a Dream explores that shifting space where patterns become landscapes, flowers become architecture, and ornament grows into entire worlds. The figures in these paintings are at home within these dreamlike worlds, embodying quiet confidence, mystery, and strength. They are inseparable from their surroundings, as though the world is continually unfolding around them.
Recurring motifs return throughout the exhibition like chapters in the same dream. Birds embody freedom and movement, while moths suggest transformation, forever drawn toward light and the unknown. The painted frames become part of the story, concealing animals, symbols, and unexpected moments that reveal themselves slowly, rewarding closer attention with each return.
Having moved from Kazakhstan to Canada as a child, I found a language in pattern before I found one in words. Embroidery, textiles, ceramics, and ornamental traditions became a lasting vocabulary that continues to shape my work. Decoration is never simply decorative; it becomes a way of building memory, identity, and imagined worlds.
Rather than illustrating a dream, these paintings offer its blueprint, inviting viewers into a world where stories are discovered instead of explained, transformation is constant, and every return reveals something new.
Artist Statement | Michelle Hoogveld
Having always been drawn to light, to colour, and to forms that hold it. This body of work commits my practice to a single recurring form: the arch, realized as a sacred entryway into a world built from colour, the show's structural and conceptual anchor throughout.
Referencing points that span architecture, design, and travel, but the most consistent source is nature itself: the sky, the strata of a cliff face, the rainbow's arc, wherever shifting bands of light arrive in full colour. These patterns are written into the world; the arch simply gives them a frame to be read through. That lineage sits alongside the hard-edge geometry of Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, held against the poured, soak-stain colour fields of Helen Frankenthaler. The arches recur in concentric bands throughout the show: singular, doubled, meeting at their centre, cropped against the edge of the canvas, each with its own emotional resonance, its own register of colour. Within each arch there's a journey, where colour breaks and collides, blocks of colour set in direct contrast, that make each passage, each dream, come alive. These passages create in myself a desire to explore, to move toward something, to feel the full aliveness of colour and light and what waits on the other side of the next arch. This is the terrain of the mind, an emotional topography mapped at the depth of a dream.
The vision creates the intention for the blueprint's form. I begin with poured washes, pools of colour, and contemplative brushstrokes, an atmospheric emotional ground: warm light on water, layered sky, heat and depth, the aliveness of a world that moves you completely. From that intuitive field that constructs the geometric framework: tape pulled across the canvas, hard edges measured and placed, bands of colour laid with deliberate precision over the gestural foundation beneath. One arrives through the other. Structure is imposed on feeling and then the feeling pushes back. Colour spills across the boundary lines. Gesture rises through the geometry. The finished surface holds both simultaneously, the planned and the spontaneous, each one making the other more alive.
My paintings make visible what nature already is: structure and sensation, pattern and overflow, the blueprint of the world and the dream it keeps becoming.
