Alleyway Gallery

Current Exhibition

The Bench
by Joe Fleming
www.joefleming.com
@joeflemingartist

Dedicated to Niki Dracos
Soundscape by Sun Rain

August - October 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday August 6th 5-8 PM

The Bench, a new digital work by Joe Fleming spans 28 feet. Through a language of layered images and an audio component, the work transforms the ordinary bench on a narrow street in Greece into both a form of measure and a confessional.

Fleming's diaristic process embraces accumulation. A scribble. A note. A drawing. A photograph. A film. The sounds of daily life. Together, these fragments create a visual narrative, woven into a cinematic digital collage that moves fluidly between lived experiences and imagination. The Bench invites viewers into the interior landscape of the mind.

Joe Fleming

Joe Fleming’s artistic practice engages deeply with the pervasive influence of Hollywood and mass media on contemporary culture. Working across a range of mediums, including painting, video, and digital art, Fleming blurs the boundaries between the hand-made and the mechanical. His dynamic mark-making merges manual gesture with machine precision, creating a compelling interplay between figure and ground within a modernist framework.

His paintings are particularly striking in their ability to manipulate light: layered surfaces allow illumination to pass through, casting shifting shadows onto the wall and activating the space beyond the painting. The resulting works are visually rich and conceptually layered, combining abstracted, animated imagery with a critical exploration of identity, mass production, political unrest, and transformation.

Joe Fleming’s career spans over two decades, marked by numerous solo exhibitions internationally in galleries in major cities, including Singapore, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, and New York City. Fleming has lectured at universities in Canada, the United States, and South East Asia since 1993. His paintings are included in numerous public and private collections, such as BMO Financial Group, Trimark Mutual Funds, Honeywell Bull, Prince Waterhouse Coopers (Malaysia), HSBC Bank, A.T. Tolley Collection, Australian High Commission, Canadian High Commission (Kuala Lumpur), the Art Gallery of Edmonton, the Museum of Civilization (Hull, Quebec), and the Holocaust Museum (LA). Fleming has participated in several international art fairs, including Art Stage (Singapore), FIAC (Paris), Arte Cologne (Germany), Scope (New York and Miami), Art Miami, Papier (Montreal), and TIAF (Toronto). His work has been featured in a variety of publications, such as Carte Blanche 2: Painting - a survey of new Canadian painting (The Magenta Foundation), 60 Painters in Canada, The Artist’s Studio (by Joseph Hartman), American Illustration,  Imago Mundi, Design Lines Magazine, Azure Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Now Magazine, CBC, Chelsea Now, and The Wall Street Journal Magazine.

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