DUO EXHIBITION
GESTURAL DIALOGUES - Cathy Daley & Janna Watson
March 7 - April 25, 2026
HOURS
Open Tuesday - Friday from 10:30am - 5pm
Open Saturday from 12pm - 4pm
Newzones is pleased to present Gestural Dialogues, a two-person exhibition featuring Canadian artists Cathy Daley and Janna Watson.
Gestural Dialogues explores the expressive power of the artist’s mark – whether painted or drawn – and the means in which it is employed as both a technical and a conceptual approach to creation. At first glance, the artistic practices of Daley and Watson are each visually distinct, yet both are grounded in a dynamic, gestural language that emphasizes movement, scale, and the physicality of mark-making. It is their shared commitment to gestural mark-making as a communicative force – allowing it to carry momentum, rhythm, and emotion – that creates a compelling conversation between their works.
Cathy Daley (1955–2022) was a prominent senior Canadian artist whose practice spanned over four decades. Renowned for her iconic drawings of billowing black dresses, tutus, and high heels rendered in dense black oil pastel on translucent vellum, Daley’s work addresses both the formal rigor of gesture and the representation of the female body. Her drawings suggest bodily presence without direct depiction, relying on exaggerated movement, sweeping arcs, and animated silhouettes. For Daley, gestural marks functioned as image and record – what she described as “a record of what took place.” Working physically, often on the floor, she reworked forms until the marks carried immediacy and vitality.
Central to Daley’s practice was her acute sense of restraint. Knowing when to stop – when absence could carry greater meaning – allowed form to remain implied. Invisible shoulders support delicate straps, while bodices swell through suggestion alone. Through this balance of excess and withholding, Daley’s work engages questions of femininity, body politics, and the cultural construction of female identity. Drawing from high fashion and classic Hollywood cinema, her images both embrace and subtly critique idealized forms, exposing the formulas behind stereotypes while maintaining a sense of glamour, camp, and nostalgia.
Janna Watson approaches gestures from a different, yet equally embodied, perspective. A former student of Daley’s at the Ontario College of Art and Design, Watson shares a commitment to mark-making as a primary vehicle for meaning. Her abstract paintings are built through a careful tension between loose, sweeping brushstrokes and thick, rigid lines, producing a painterly language that is immediately recognizable. While her work gestures toward the familiar, it resists fixed representation, allowing bundles of colour to move across fields of slow chromatic gradation to create depth, rhythm, and spatial unfolding.
For Watson, abstraction is not a retreat from meaning, but a means through which paint itself emerges as a “figure” within its own emotional and material world. Gesture unfolds as both action and pause, held in balance by restraint and modulation. In this way, Watson’s work parallels Daley’s in its understanding of gestural marks not as expressive excess, but as a disciplined and communicative act.
When presented together, Daley’s exuberant black-and-white figures and Watson’s expressive, colour-driven abstractions heighten one another through their shared commitment to gesture as a record of movement, decision, and presence. Differences in palette, medium, and conceptual focus amplify the gestural mark’s capacity to communicate beyond image or narrative. Gestural Dialogues brings these practices into conversation, revealing how the gestural mark – whether drawn or painted – can articulate identity, emotion, and physicality across distinct yet interconnected artistic languages.