The works in the main gallery exhibition, “Transactions of the Eye,” act as a bridge between featured artist Harold Coego’s two home countries: Cuba, where historical and cultural heroes surrounded him, and Canada, where new characters and new human interactions shape a different life.

In Canada, Harold Coego has been able to investigate his relationship with his home country and rediscover himself as a visual artist. Coego’s collage work, incorporating figures from Cuban currency, draws upon the historical “characters” which were received by the artist in a non-critical way when he was a child. Now, thirty years later, Coego gives these characters the chance to break through their own historical frame and wander free as commodities in an abstract world of ink and irony. The resulting images look like they’ve come out of an abstract cinematographic kaleidoscope that blurs the boundaries of nations with the power of imagination.