18.06.26 – 06.09.26
Johann Andreu / Lottie Burns / Ella Garvey / Nieves González / JJ Guest / Takehiko Inoue / Amanda Larkin / Shane Lee Lyons / Radka Leitmeritz / Grace McMurray / Andrew McConnell / Kasper Nyman / Colin J. Radcliffe / Sheena Rose / Jansson Stegner / Chloé Wary / Gina Wynbrandt / Younguk Yi
The eighth instalment of the Naughton Gallery’s acclaimed sports exhibition series explores the high-stakes territory where art and sport intersect. Bringing together an international selection of artists working across painting, photography, textiles, sculpture, comics, installation, and publishing, the exhibition examines sport not simply as entertainment or spectacle, but as a powerful cultural arena through which ideas of identity, politics, gender, aspiration, and belonging are continuously negotiated.
Across the exhibition, the sporting body emerges as both celebrated and scrutinised: disciplined, commodified, mythologised, and politicised in equal measure. The works on display consider how sport shapes both personal and collective identities, functioning simultaneously as a site of visibility, pressure, exclusion, resistance, and release. Themes of masculinity, queer identity, fandom, celebrity, labour, vulnerability, and representation run throughout the exhibition, revealing the complex social and emotional structures embedded within sporting culture. At the same time, the exhibition examines the aesthetics and visual language of sport itself – its gestures, uniforms, architecture, rituals, and systems of image production – highlighting how these forms construct meaning, desire, and belonging both within and beyond the arena.
A complementary display of design-led publications expands this dialogue further, tracing how sport circulates through publishing, graphic design, and mass media. Historic Roland-Garros posters and the rereleased Nike Moon Shoe similarly foreground the enduring relationship between sport, aesthetics, commerce, and cultural memory.
Ultimately, the exhibition positions sport as far more than a game: a lens through which wider questions surrounding power, identity, community, and contemporary culture come sharply into focus.
Grace McMurray
This body of work emerged from the artist’s immersion in the ice hockey romance series Heated Rivalry and its television adaptation. Following the story weekly through unofficial online streams, McMurray found in it a rare and affecting portrayal of queer longing, tenderness, and emotional vulnerability. The resulting works translate the emotional world of the series into textile form, using sportswear and fan culture as vehicles for identification, devotion, and self-expression.
Shane Hollander Fleece takes inspiration from the Canadian Winter Olympics ice hockey jacket worn in the show, reimagined as a declaration of fandom, vulnerability, and queer visibility within the “real, terrifying world.” The loon bird – a recurring motif within the narrative and later tattooed by the character Ilya Rosanov – becomes a symbol of intimacy, secrecy, and shared language between the couple. In Canada Dry, a bejewelled gym bag references the ginger ale repeatedly requested by Shane to settle the anxiety he experiences as an autistic man, reflecting McMurray’s connection to the show’s subtle and nuanced representation of autism. The Cottage (Episode 6) centres on the refuge of Barlochan Cottage, embroidered onto a fleece resembling Ontario’s lakes. Here, the cottage becomes a symbol of safety, queer domesticity, and chosen belonging – “out of the closet and into the cottage.”
Grace McMurray 