Thresholds of Perception: Where Observation Becomes Experience
Starts: Sunday August 16, 2026
Meet The Artists: Sunday August 16, 2026 between 1 - 4pm
Where: Atelier Ironwood, 1425 Lakeshore Rd. NOTL (2nd fl.)
Featuring Artists: Svetlana Turov and Ron Wilkie
Ends: Sunday September 13, 2026
This exhibition brings together the distinct yet resonant practices of Ron Wilkie and Svetlana Turov in a shared inquiry into how we perceive, interpret, and emotionally register the world around us. Rather than focusing on landscape or material as subject alone, both artists explore the shift that occurs between looking and experiencing—where image becomes atmosphere, and material becomes sensation.
Ron Wilkie’s paintings begin in observation, grounded in the language of the Canadian landscape. His works carry the clarity of realism while gradually opening into something more psychological and emotive. Forests, shorelines, skies, and shifting light are rendered with precision, yet they resist fixed interpretation. Instead, they become spaces of transition—where memory, mood, and perception reshape what is seen into what is felt. Drawing from both direct experience and imagined reconstruction, Wilkie creates landscapes that feel familiar without belonging to a single place, allowing viewers to enter through their own associations and recollections. Through luminous colour, careful composition, and an attention to atmosphere, his paintings move beyond documentation and become quiet meditations on presence, reflection, and our emotional relationship with the natural world.
In contrast, Svetlana Turov works through material transformation. Using natural fibers such as wool and silk, she constructs layered, tactile compositions that move between abstraction and representation. Many of her Fiber Fine Art works do not depict landscape directly but instead echo its forces—erosion, flow, density, and rhythm—through surface, texture, and structure. Alongside these material explorations, Turov also incorporates figurative elements within her practice, including interpretations of animals and the human face, extending her investigation of emotion, presence, and connection through fiber. Across both approaches, the material itself becomes a carrier of meaning, where touch and visual perception converge.
Together, their practices form a dialogue between image and material, observation and embodiment. Wilkie’s painted atmospheres and Turov’s constructed surfaces meet at a point where perception is no longer passive, but active and unfolding.
Thresholds of Perception: Where Observation Becomes Experience invites viewers into this in-between space—where seeing slows, attention deepens, and the act of looking becomes an experience in itself.
FEATURED ARTISTS
Svetlana Turov, professionally known as sFeltLana, is a Canadian Fiber Fine Artist whose immersive textile works occupy a compelling space between painting and sculpture. Through an innovative approach rooted in traditional felting practices and expanded through contemporary fine art methodologies, Turov creates richly layered compositions that challenge conventional perceptions of textile as craft and position fiber as a powerful medium of contemporary artistic expression.
Ron Wilkie is a Canadian landscape painter whose richly detailed paintings celebrate the enduring beauty of Canada’s natural environment. Working in both oil and watercolour, Wilkie creates immersive scenes inspired by the forests, lakes, shorelines, and changing light of Northern Ontario and beyond.
Thresholds of Perception exhibition invite image. (Left) Svetlana Turov. Glowing Sun, 2020 Fiber 46.5” x 35” (Right) Ron Wilkie. At the Water’s Edge,2026 oil on canvas 36” x 48”
