PLATO

PLATO is excited to present Sylvia Trotter Ewens’ inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery, Echoes of Elsewhere, opening with a public reception on Friday, April 24, from 6-8 PM. It will remain on view through May 30.

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In Echoes of Elsewhere, Honduran-Canadian painter Sylvia Trotter Ewens presents a deeply personal body of work that navigates memory, identity, and the shifting terrain between cultures. Through layered, atmospheric paintings, she constructs fragmented environments shaped as much by lived experience as by distance and imagination.

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Born in Honduras and raised in Montreal after being adopted as an infant, Trotter Ewens has long experienced a sense of dual belonging. Familiar places surface unexpectedly within unfamiliar ones—a fleeting recognition of “elsewhere” within the present. “Echoes,” for Trotter Ewens, are the lingering impressions of environments and relationships that persist across time. Drawing from photographs taken while walking and documenting both Honduras and Quebec, she digitally collages composite landscapes before translating them into paint. These constructed sites merge and juxtapose distinct geographies, reflecting the artist’s experience of being “neither completely of here nor there,” but continually building a sense of place in between.

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Trotter Ewens is attentive to how environments across both Honduras and Montreal are constantly in flux—shaped by development and erosion. Sites that once held specific personal or communal meaning are gradually transformed or reconfigured. Gardens, built structures, and open spaces recur throughout the exhibition, often interrupted by visible points of fracture that disrupt the image’s resolution, emphasizing the constructed and shifting nature of the spaces she depicts.

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Nature plays a central role in this negotiation. While language has shaped Trotter Ewens’ experience of cultural distance—particularly through not being fully fluent in Spanish—landscape offers a form of connection that does not require translation. In Montreal, this connection often takes the form of visits to tropical greenhouses, where heat, humidity, and dense vegetation recreate the sensory conditions of Honduras. These encounters are intimate and immersive, yet never fully equivalent. The tension between proximity and distance carries into the paintings, where tropical foliage and northern environments intermingle. 

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The sense of flux is embedded in Trotter Ewens’ painting process. She approaches each work as a “construction site”, building images through successive layers that remain partially visible. Beginning with diluted underpainting washes—often contrasting warm and cool tones—she develops the surface through gestural mid-layers applied quickly and instinctively. These moments of speed and improvisation balance the more controlled final layers. Some areas are deliberately left unresolved, exposing underlayers, drips, and shifts in opacity. The surface reveals its own making, mirroring the impermanence and continual reconstruction of the spaces Trotter Ewens explores.

 

Subtle traces of personal memory run throughout the exhibition. The loss of her adoptive mother, Priscilla Ewens—who was a vital cultural and emotional bridge connecting Sylvia to her Honduran roots—remains an undercurrent, particularly in the artist’s return to places and environments associated with her, evoking an ongoing closeness that persists beyond visibility. Nature, once again, becomes a conduit expanding the “elsewhere” of the exhibition beyond geography into a metaphysical dimension.

 

Rather than offering a resolved statement, Echoes of Elsewhere presents a process—the ongoing construction of a sense of self shaped by multiple worlds, where past and present, here and elsewhere, remain in constant flux.

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Sylvia Trotter Ewens’ (b.1995, Honduras) artistic practice focuses on collaged painterly compositions of fragmented spaces that construct subtle narratives and contemplative reflections on shifting landscapes. Her paintings blend architectural aesthetics, ecological discourse, and personal narrative, creating spaces that are both tangible and psychologically evocative. Walking, observing, photographing, and writing form the foundation of Trotter Ewen’s creative process. Her paintings often incorporate gardens and man-made structures. By reimagining and redesigning these spaces, Trotter Ewens explores the psychological shifts that occur within them, ultimately questioning how we perceive, interact with, and reshape the world around us.

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Sylvia Trotter Ewens is a Honduran-Canadian painter based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Canada. She received her DEC in Fine Arts from Dawson College (2014), followed by a BFA in Fine Arts with a major in Painting and Drawing (2018) and an MFA in Painting at Concordia University (2024). Trotter Ewens has received numerous awards, including The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, the Claude F. Lefebvre Scholarship, the Shirley Reed Graduate Scholarship, and the Lillian Vineberg Graduate Award. Her work has been featured in both solo and group exhibitions at venues such as Duran Contemporain, Montreal (2025), PLATO, New York (2025), Maison de la Culture NDG Botrel Gallery, Montreal (2024), Warren G. Flowers Art Gallery, Montreal (2024), and Art Mûr, Montreal (2023), among others.