A Forwards Retreat
Curated by Rui Pimenta
Art Nest 2026 is a gift.
TOAF’s 65th Birthday signature project
July 10–12, 2026
Nathan Phillips Square, Toronto
To mark TOAF’s 65th birthday, Art Nest curator Rui Pimenta has brought together celebrated Canadian artists — Peggy Baker, Max Dean, Naomi Dodds, Micah Lexier, and Ed Pien — to reflect on what it means to retire as an artist.
Not retirement. A retreat forward. An exhibition about the longevity of art, of practice, and of the artists who keep the calling alive.
Rui Pimenta on A Forwards Retreat
It is an honour to be working with artists Peggy Baker, Max Dean, Naomi Dodds, Micah Lexier, and Ed Pien on this year’s edition of the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair as it marks its 65th anniversary, a milestone that invites both celebration and reflection. When I was invited to curate the Art Nest program, I was drawn not only to the fair’s longevity, but to the symbolic weight of the number itself. Sixty-five is commonly associated with retirement, a threshold that signals the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. However, the etymology of retirement suggests not simply stopping, but a withdrawal, a drawing back, an active “retreat” into contemplation rather than cessation.
This prompted a series of questions that shape this exhibition’s curatorial framework: What does retirement mean for an artist? How does one retreat from a practice that is not merely a profession, but a core part of one’s identity? What can we learn from artists, particularly those 65 or older, about time, continuity, and creative life? And how do we reconcile these reflections with the reality that, for many artists, retirement in its traditional sense is not financially possible?
In my work as a curator, I have had the privilege of collaborating with artists across generations, and one insight has become increasingly clear: for many, what they do is far more than a job, it is a vocation in the truest sense, a “calling”. The work an artist does resists neat endings. It evolves, adapts, and carries forward traces of earlier selves, shaped through time, memory, and accumulated experience.
Many of the works in this exhibition extend beyond individual authorship towards concerns for exchange, participation, and distribution, where meaning is activated through others; whether through performance, public engagement, or the transfer of ownership. In doing so, they challenge the fixity of the art object, reframing it as something lived with, cared for, or dispersed. These works also engage reflection in both a perceptual and psychological sense, where meaning emerges through layered time and lived experience.
While retirement is often framed as closure, the artists in this exhibition complicate this narrative. Their works resist finality, instead embracing transformation and continuity. Identity and practice are understood as relational –formed through time, place, and repetition– where earlier iterations are built upon and carried forward. Retirement becomes less an end than a shift in pace, focus, or perception, opening space for reflection and renewed forms of making.
As we reflect on 65 years of the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair, this exhibition invites you to not only to look back, but to consider how artistic practice endures, across time, across life stages, and beyond conventional definitions of work. If retirement marks a threshold, then through the lens of the artist, it is less an ending than an ongoing transformation, a state in which the calling to create continues to unfold.
The Works
Peggy Baker
Storyline (with laughter, tears and beauty)
Dance Performance
Saturday, July 11 at 3:00 PM & 5:00 PM
Sunday, July 12 at 12:00 PM & 2:00 PM
Location: Stage
“I am a choreographer who has spent much of my life as a dancer, often working solo. In both watching and making dance, it is the presence of the dancer, as much as the situation of the dance itself, that grips me.
Storyline (with laughter, tears and beauty) is a solo created for the extraordinary veteran dancer Julia Sasso. Together, we wondered whether it might be possible to capture something of what a dancer carries in their body after half a century of creation and performance.
The work invites Julia to activate a small group of compelling soft sculptures by Janine Miedzik. In the background of the performance area sits a large LED screen, on which filmmaker Jeremy Mimnagh contemplates the surfaces of Miedzik’s work, and moving through a rich, personal sound archive by John Gzowski, Julia accesses a physical sensibility honed over a lifetime in dance.”
Peggy Baker / choreographer
Dancer: Julia Sasso @slimpikins15
Sculptural pieces: Janine Miedzik @janinemiedzik
Score: John Gzowski @gzapper
Media design: Jeremy Mimnagh @mimnagh.ca
Photograph Courtesy Stephen Bulger Gallery.
Max Dean
Passing On – An Exhibition of Martha Fleury’s Work
“Passing On is a project that brings together over fifty years of work by my late wife, Martha Fleury, from her early childhood to her passing in November 2023. A deeply private yet prolific artist, Martha left behind an estate of more than 1,400 paintings, drawings, and journals. What she shared publicly was only a glimpse; the work I’ve since discovered reveals a far greater depth. This project is about passing her work on.
I have established the Martha Fleury Public Trust as a way to share her legacy. Throughout the three days of the Art Nest exhibition members of the public are invited to become trustees by selecting a work and taking responsibility for its care. There is no cost, only a commitment to live with and care for the work. In this way, her artwork is dispersed to be held collectively rather than stored away.
The other part of this project consists of an installation I have created by assembling some of Martha’s artworks along with her personal effects and furniture to create a series of tableaus. These arrangements offer a glimpse into her world, her habits, her sensibility, her presence, while also serving as a sort of artistic collaboration between the two of us.
This project is an act of sharing her work, her memory, and the responsibility that comes with both. I want her work to be seen, lived with, and carried forward in many hands.”
Naomi Dodds
Oneself Through Another
“Resembling a geological form split in two, Oneself Through Another is a sculpture that explores reflection as both a perceptual and psychological reality; one that shifts from outward production toward introspection shaped by time, memory, and accumulated experience. Formed from stainless steel and divided across temporal states, a bruised exterior holds deep time and past labour, set against a mirrored interior that asserts the immediacy of the present. Influenced by Paul Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another, this sculpture presents identity and its connection to the aging process, as relational: something born through discourse, place, and prior iterations of the self. Rather than suggesting withdrawal, the dual forms propose continuity through transformation, where earlier selves are not discarded but carried forward.”
Micah Lexier
One Day
“The following text appears on 23,980 custom-made aluminum coins: “I Micah Lexier, have minted one coin for every day I have lived up until July 10, 2026. From that day forward I will give the coins away, one coin per person, until all the coins are gone or I am dead.”
On Friday July 10, 2026, which is the opening of the 65th edition of the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair, I will be at the fair handing out coins to anyone who would like one. I will do this for the duration of the three-day fair or until all the coins have been given away. If all the coins have not been given away by the end of the fair, then I will extend the project outside of this original context and will offer the coins to people I encounter in my daily life. Once all the coins have been given away, the project will be completed. If I die before all the coins are given away, then a pile of the remaining coins will constitute my final artwork.”
Ed Pien
Mirror, Mirror
“Mirror, Mirror is an immersive installation featuring twelve antique vanities, each adorned with mirrors and inscribed with contemplative texts about time. As viewers pass by or sit before these mirrors, their reflections are disrupted and complicated by text, prompting introspection and a heightened awareness of time’s persistent presence and relentless flow.
Drawing on the tradition of vanitas, the vanity—a site for the daily ritual of self-presentation—is reimagined here as a space for reflection in the form of introspection. Marked by age and use, the mirrors carry traces of past lives, confronting viewers with their own fleeting existence.Through layered reflections and text, Mirror, Mirror invites viewers to consider memory, impermanence, and the ever-shifting, unstable nature of the self across time.”
Behind Art Nest
Rui Pimenta,
Independent Curator
Rui Pimenta practiced as a visual artist from 2000-2014, exhibiting his work extensively in Canada and internationally. Since then his creative focus has shifted towards programming and curation. In 2009 he founded Art Spin, an arts organization now entering its 16th year of presenting site-specific, multidisciplinary programming in unique/alternative spaces and best known for its bicycle art tours. He was the Co-Director for Median Contemporary (2008-10) and has curated projects for the Toronto Artists Project, the Toronto Outdoor Exhibition, Eastern Front Gallery and the Government of Portugal. He has served on various arts council juries, was a member of the City of Toronto’s Public Art Strategy Advisory Committee, as well as having sat on the Advisory Committee of The Bentway. His curatorial aspirations are largely motivated by the enthusiastic pursuit of creating engaging and accessible ways to present art in public space.
Calder Ross,
Art Nest Technical Director
With 15 years of experience in the execution and production of events and art exhibitions, Calder has found a niche as an expert at executing polished final products based on ambitious artistic visions.
Calder has worked as head stage manager and production designer for Fashion Art Toronto for 12 years. He works with 50 designers and performers a season, weaving their individual visions into a cohesive show.
Calder has designed stages and lighting plots for many events in Toronto. Most notably—Promise Indoor Events/Cherry Beach Sundays (since 2018), Fashion Art Toronto (since 2012), DOCD (Summer 2023), and Summer Camp (2022). He is excited to bring his production expertise to TOAF, Canada’s largest and longest-running annual contemporary art fair.
