Take what you have, make what you need brings together Claudia Gutierrez and Guillermo Trejo in a shared exploration of material constraint, authorship, and cultural inheritance. Both artists embrace imperfect processes such as stitching, dyeing, cutting, and printing as a means of resisting systems rooted in standardization, industrial precision, and colonial modernism. Gutierrez’s stitched compositions reflect the domestic histories of textile, transformed by improvisation, repetition, and the embodied realities of caregiving. Trejo interrogates the failures of architectural modernism in Latin America, using serialized mark-making and geometric distortion to expose the gap between imported ideals and lived experience. Across both practices, the hand disrupts the machine, and imperfection becomes an act of refusal. Whether in stretched threads or warped grids, the works trace a visual language of adaptation, where scarcity becomes generative and the act of making becomes a negotiation between memory, labour, and the structures we inherit or resist.

The exhibition runs from July 18 until August 30, 2025

Image: Claudia Gutierrez, Untitled, 2025, 30 x 30 inches, Hand dyed canvas, hand embroidered acrylic, 2025

Guillermo Trejo is a Mexican/Canadian Artist based in Ottawa. He completed his BFA at the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Etching in Mexico City with a specialization in printmaking, in 2007 he moved to Canada. The experience of immigration reshape Trejo’s work. Since moving to Ottawa, he has earned an MFA from University of Ottawa and has been an active member of the artistic community. He is a well known  professor at the Ottawa School of Art, a board of director of Ottawa Art Gallery and a volunteer with different non for profit organization