Alleyway Gallery

Current Exhibition

Through the Prism of a Fire

by Johannes Zits
@johanneszits
www.johanneszits.com

May - July 2026
Opening Reception May 7 2026, 5 - 8 PM
Performances May 2026  Friday 22, 6:30 PM and Saturday 23, 3 PM

In recent years, wildfires have become increasingly frequent and severe around the world and across Canada, burning larger areas and lasting longer than before. Once largely confined to remote regions, these fires now encroach on communities, displace people and wildlife, and transform entire ecosystems. 

Through the Prism of a Fire is a panoramic image capturing the aftermath of a forest fire that swept through a clear-cut and its surrounding landscape in 2024, near a creek in the Cariboo region of British Columbia, within the unceded territory of the Lhtako Dene Nation.

While fire is a natural part of the forest’s life cycle, increased and sustained human activity has disrupted this balance. Industrial logging, monocultures, and conventional forestry practices have stripped away the diversity and resilience that once allowed ecosystems to recover. Rising temperatures and decades of suppressing natural burns have left forests unnaturally dense and fuel-laden. Together, these pressures have transformed fire from a regenerative force into a destructive one, reshaping not only the land but also the communities, human and more-than-human, that depend on it.

Presented as a large-scale billboard within the intimate confines of a laneway, the work brings a distant and often inaccessible landscape into the urban environment. Though viewers encounter only an image of the site, the scale and proximity of the photograph evoke a visceral sense of presence, an invitation to reflect on the magnitude and immediacy of a crisis that feels both remote and profoundly close to home.

The work also resonates with the artist’s ongoing practice as a performance-based artist exploring the relationships and meanings expressed through both human and non-human bodies. Zits expands the notion of performance to include the more-than-human beings he engages with, rocks, water, and plants, recognizing their vitality and agency within shared ecosystems. His process of witnessing, listening, and moving with these presences reflects an awareness that life unfolds through interdependence and reciprocity. Whether through the rhythm of water, the resilience of trees, or the slow transformation of stone, Zits’ practice acknowledges how each being contributes to cycles of decay and renewal. In this context, Through the Prism of a Fire can be seen as both documentation and dialogue, an image that bears witness to the land’s transformations and reminds us that destruction, too, carries the potential for regeneration.

Performance

Positioned in a downtown laneway, the billboard Through the Prism of a Fire pulls a distant, damaged landscape into sharp focus. This large-scale image of a wildfire’s aftermath, clear-cut terrain swept into devastation, becomes the anchor for a series of live performances, presented in the context the closing of the CONTACT Festival in May. Co-presented by Alleyway Gallery and FADO Performance Art Centre, the program features 10 artists offering distinct responses to this fractured landscape against the backdrop of the city.

Through forms such as spoken word, sound, fleeting installations, and subtle gestures, the artists stage live conversations between the billboard image of the scorched forest and the urban space that holds it. Working with the laneway’s acoustics, interruptions, and constraints, each artist initiates their own brief bridge between altered forest and public life. Together, these actions reimagine the billboard as a site of exchange where memory, place, and embodied presence meet in the tense space between destruction and renewal.

Performers
Friday:  Dermot Wilson, Quan Steele, Gwen MacGregor, Fan Wu and Marilyn Yogararjah
Saturday: Isaak Fong, Christopher Petersen, lwrds duniam, lo bil, and Johannes Zits

Bio

Johannes Zits (Toronto, ON) holds a BFA from York University. For over 40 years, he has performed and exhibited his art extensively across Canada and around the world in such places as Zendai Contemporary, Shanghai; ATEA, Mexico City; and International BNL of Asuncion, Paraguay. His work is in public collections such as the Copenhagen Contemporary Museum, The Alberta Arts Foundation, and York University.

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