Join us for the Artist Reception &
Poetry Reading February 21st, 7-9pm

Eros and Psyche gathers together the artwork of eight artists whose practices move through intimacy and vulnerability, creativity and connection. These vital energies bind bodies to one another and selves to the world. Taking its name from the ancient Greek myth, the exhibition approaches Eros and Psyche not simply as lovers, but as enduring symbols of the relationship between desire and consciousness, body and soul.

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In myth, Eros is the personification of erotic desire and Psyche, whose name means “breath of life”, embodies the human soul. Their union is not immediate nor effortless; it unfolds through concealment, curiosity, betrayal, and endurance. Psyche’s initial love is blind - experienced in darkness, without knowledge. When she dares to bring awareness to what was once hidden, she initiates a painful yet necessary rupture that propels her into a series of trials. These trials mark a maturation of the soul: a passage from innocence to awareness. Ultimately, Psyche’s suffering becomes transformative, allowing her to reunite with Eros not as a fantasy, but in a conscious, reciprocal bond. Psyche’s journey is one of individuation, of learning that love must be earned through sacrifice and transformation.

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This arc mirrors a psychological understanding of Eros as libido; the instinctual life force that drives creation and connection. Libido here is not confined to sexuality alone, but understood as generative energy; an animating hunger that fuels artistic practice as much as it fuels intimacy. It is the same force that pulls bodies toward touch and artists toward form. Creativity emerges as an erotic act in its own right: a translation of desire between inner and outer worlds.

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Within a North American cultural context, sexuality is often framed through narrow ideals shaped by religious morality, capitalist aesthetics, and an enduring fixation on youth. Aging bodies, non-reproductive desire, spiritual sensuality, and expressions of libido outside sanctioned norms are frequently rendered invisible or taboo. This aversion fractures the relationship between body and soul, reinforcing the belief that erotic vitality diminishes with age or must be disentangled from spirituality altogether.  

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Against this backdrop, Eros and Psyche offers a subtle yet insistent refusal. The artists assembled here expand the symbolic boundaries of desire, treating libido as a lifelong, changeable force rather than a finite resource. By acknowledging desire as something that persists through aging, their works expand the visual and symbolic language of sexuality, making space for reverence. In doing so, they propose more inclusive, humane, and truthful ways of understanding the erotic life of the soul. 

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Across the exhibition, each artist engages with this life force differently. Their varied artistic methods, spanning material choices and embodied processes, serve as metaphors for the diversity of human experiences of love and sexuality. Some works linger in softness and suggestion, invoking vulnerability and quiet intimacy; others assert themselves through fragmentation. Some works speak softly, operating through suggestion and vulnerability; others assert themselves through intensity or excess. Together, they map a constellation of erotic states: longing and fulfillment, rupture and pleasure, grief and tenderness. This friction recalls the psychological conversation between life-affirming and destructive energies. It is precisely through this tension that transformation occurs. Love and creativity are inseparable from risk. Transformation demands vulnerability; to desire is to risk change.

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Eros and Psyche invites viewers into this charged terrain, asking them to consider love and sexuality not as fixed identities or moral outcomes, but as ongoing processes of becoming. In honouring Eros as a generative life force, the exhibition affirms creativity as one of its most enduring expressions—a space where instinct meets awareness, where the body speaks to the soul, and where the psyche continues its unfinished work of knowing itself. Like Psyche, we are shaped by what we long for and what we dare to bring into consciousness.