Ella Gonzales: Memory’s Architecture

How do we map our memories in the spaces we call home? Do we trace the architectural components that order our habits and routines? Or the furnishings, possessions, and people that fill the space? Ella Gonzales is a Filipina-Canadian artist based in Toronto whose practice suggests that memory moves as fluctuating fragments surging and receding upon each other as they move across the slippery surface of the mind. Gonzales uses abstraction as a technique in her paintings and installations to encompass the complicated and elusive narratives of home and the ideologies that both shape and disrupt it, such as migration and diaspora. By deconstructing forms and sensitively selecting the materials in her work, she creates poetic assemblages to rethink how we understand place and identity. Gonzales traces a personal journey of finding home that echoes the parallel movements of Filipino migration and the histories of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization. Here, individual memories latch onto collective ones. While her work draws from personal and familial memories, she presents them as speculative and fragmented rather than following timelines built from departures and arrivals. She uses geometric forms that surpass their surfaces or never fully take shape to contemplate the circuitous geographies of home and the spatial dimensions of memory. 

Gonzales uses computer-aided design (CAD) programs commonly used for architectural drawings to render collages of the interior spaces of homes her family has lived in around the world. These graphic composites map her parents’ journey as overseas workers from the Philippines to Saudi Arabia, where Gonzales was born, and finally to Canada, where they moved a few times on the east side of the Greater Toronto Area. These renderings are created from reference photographs but also from memory, layering elements such as walls, windows, hallways, and stairs. In this digitally mediated reconstruction, Gonzales doesn’t aim for architectural precision; in fact, she nearly disavows it. By using digital tools to recreate scenes of home, she acknowledges that these representations are fundamentally imagined negotiations of space, fraught with potential contradictions or inevitable blind spots. Any technical authority gives way to a best attempt, capturing spaces that exist as much in longing as in logic. 

Gonzales paints these renderings onto a translucent fabric canvas, making work akin to architectural drawings on tracing paper. She uses the semi-sheer Filipino fabrics of piña (pineapple) and jusi (traditionally made from banana leaves but replaced with modern silk organza). Although her minimalist paintings do not depict figures or objects, her choice of these materials for canvas points to a deeper connection: the fabrics are used for clothing worn during significant milestones or celebrations in the Philippines. Despite their altered context, Gonzales and members of the Filipino diaspora are called back to a sensorial awareness, memories of wearing the garments, of feeling these materials against the body. It is an embodied cultural memory that transcends mere figuration and resonates beyond what is on the canvas—memory is felt, not shown. 

Besides holding symbolic significance, these textiles allow Gonzales to extend the pictorial space through their translucency. The tones of the acrylic paint become more pronounced and converge into solid blocks of colour where the architectural planes collide in her reconstructions. Walls bleed through doorways, and stairs intersect with windows. The varying degrees of opacity create an illusion of depth that forms a sublime multiverse that is neither purely two-dimensional nor convincingly three-dimensional, but rather a palimpsest where multiple realities coexist, collapse, and reform. These seemingly infinite rooms are an externalization of Gonzales’ interiority.

Installed with hinges, the paintings can swing from the wall, mimicking the doors and windows they represent. The transparent recto-verso arrangement enables both sides to be seen simultaneously. This transparency refuses painting’s conventional promise of a singular, frontal truth, and looks to how memory operates multivalently: as fragments visible from multiple vantage points, never fully graspable from any single perspective. While this offers an emancipatory promise, similar to how migration may allow opportunities for economic or social advancement, it also signals rupture and upheaval, requiring one to quickly reorient without one’s established internal compass. The viewer, like the migrant, discovers that freedom from one fixed position necessitates the constant labour of self-location. 

In recontextualizing her familial history, Gonzales foregrounds that the Filipino diaspora includes hundreds of thousands of domestic workers who leave the Philippines annually for employment abroad. In this reality, multiple homes exist simultaneously for an individual. While Gonzales’ paintings contain these intimate domestic worlds, they ultimately strive to transcend their boundaries, seeking a dimension capable of holding all these places. Acknowledging the world-building potential here, Gonzales also grapples with the configuration of her identity and the inevitable dissonance of forming a coherent self-narrative. 

In the installation, Fill, pack, fold (2024), dozens of unstretched painted canvases are neatly folded and placed into a wooden box resembling both a dresser drawer and a small table. Only a small glimpse of the composition is visible on the edges of the canvases, a strategy of both concealment and compression. The work evokes “balikbayan boxes” that contain gifts sent or brought back to the Philippines by Filipinos working abroad. Gonzales introduces the dimension of modularity vis-à-vis a need for portability or compartmentalization. The constrained space within the box is representative of the limited possessions one can carry or acquire while in flux, highlighting the material and emotional economies of displacement. While one may also extoll the so-called resourcefulness of immigrants to do more with less, one must also face the cruel necessity of flattening oneself for mobility. 

Gonzales cites postcolonial scholar Édouard Glissant’s theory of the right to opacity—the right to preserve one’s complex personhood without it being diminished or forced to assimilate into dominant worldviews, especially those imposed by (neo)colonialism or globalization—as a strategy that undergirds her artistic practice.¹ This right to opacity serves as an intervention for genuine relation and understanding to take hold through the unknowable. Gonzales explores these ideas in Sleeve (2024–25), a spatially responsive installation commissioned by Mercer Union for a billboard on the exterior of their building, inspired by a poetics of becoming.²

In the first of three iterations, Gonzales layered her paintings that recreate old family textiles under a plastic sheet obscuring most of their detail, allowing only the contour of the silhouette to show through. This plastic acted as a “companion surface,” serving to hold, protect, obscure, and perhaps disrupt the underlying composition.³ The work was inspired by the same plastic sleeves her father used to preserve important documents and mementos. Through this technique, Gonzales employs opacity not only as a thematic element but also as a material one, creating a layer that interrupts the viewer’s access to the narrative cemented by her father’s archival impulses.

As the series progressed, the covering changed with each iteration, and additional paintings were added under its surface. The second sleeve is slightly more translucent, revealing more of the accumulating mass of textile-paintings and their striped patterns. The third and final sleeve is the most transparent and mesh-like, and we see the final intricate tableau of paintings most clearly. Gonzales’ gestures of opacity aren’t simply about withholding nor an idealization of a fixed past, but a method in which she can unpack intangible expressions of diaspora over time, where permeability evolves. Gonzales’ origins become integrated within the new geographies and contexts of Toronto. The plastic material resembles the same construction material covering the many developments in the neighbourhood where Mercer Union is located, ubiquitous in many cities in a process of revitalization at best and gentrification at worst. This material connects the artist’s personal excavations to the broader urban transformations happening around her work’s exhibition. The surface is a threshold to critically engage with place and present conditions. 

Her inquiry into compression and concealment continues with her use of appropriated domestic items from her cherished archive of references. For an exhibition titled “A Room’s Proportion” (2025) at YYZ Artists’ Outlet, her painted work on silk was a recreated wall-length curtain from a photo of a party in her parents’ apartment in Saudi Arabia. The rippling folds of the canvas-curtain become a continuum of amalgamated histories that brush up against one another, embodying the discreet but poignant virtue of compression over expansion. 

Curtains reappear in Gonzales’s show at Unit 17 in Vancouver, “Twofold,” on a smaller scale but in a more sculptural form. Pleated canvases are hung across the bottom of a wooden trapezoid board, placed on the wall like a sconce. They denote utility in their shelf-like construction and convincing volume, yet they contain a deficiency. The boards slope downwards, unable to form a flush ninety-degree angle with the wall or support anything on their surface; as if to say, all this expansion, this claiming of space, for what?   

As suggested by its title, “Twofold,” the exhibition unfolds across two rooms and is installed so that if you were to fold the exhibition along the shared wall separating the two rooms, the works in each room would have a mirrored double. This spatial intervention physically brings the viewer into the fold and replicates the act of mental recall, much like the one the artist engages in herself: comparing, measuring, and noting what shifts between each room. Through the slight asymmetries, Gonzales stages a multilayered architecture shaped by both the slippages and reifications of memory, not mapped linearly but topographically within space.

Gonzales’s practice interrogates the architecture of memory itself. Her work asks whether we seek symmetry and structure in our recollections or learn to navigate the amorphous, fallible, yet deeply human process of remembering the spaces held in our mind and the spaces that continue on without us. Gonzales constructs what might be called an affective envelope—a dwelling for psychic inhabitation that embraces relational approaches, where our identities are not found in our origins but rather our intersections, and our histories are not single points of departure but overlapping possibilities, ready to be packed and unpacked.

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Trey Le was born in coastal Southeast Vietnam and immigrated and settled in Canada as a child. He is a cultural worker, writer, and curator and has held roles with Western Front; the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia; PuSh International Performing Arts Festival; Out on Screen; and Toronto International Film Festival.

Ella Gonzales is a Filipina Canadian artist working between painting and computer-aided design programs. She has recently exhibited at Unit 17, Vancouver (2024); grunt gallery, Vancouver (2024); The Power Plant, Toronto (2023); Galerie Nicolas Robert, Toronto (2023); Xpace Cultural Centre, Toronto (2023); and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge (2022). She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Western University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Guelph. Gonzales is represented by Unit 17, Vancouver.

1. Danica Pinteric, “Twofold,” Unit 17, https://www.unit17.org/ellagonzales-twofold.
2. Mercer Union, Sleeve: as that surface fluctuates, exhibition of work by Ella Gonzales, Toronto, June 16–September 25, 2025, https://www.mercerunion.org/exhibitions/as-that-surface-fluctuates.
3. Mercer Union, Sleeve: A YEAR IN REVIEW, exhibition of work by Ella Gonzales, Toronto, January 24–June 12, 2025, https://www.mercerunion.org/exhibitions/gonzales-a-year-in-review.

This article is published in issue 42.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue