Nellie Jalalzadeh
My photography celebrates the alchemy of chance encounters and examines the containers that hold them. I capture life in its familiar and forgotten fragments, forever catching myself scattered across the many veils, windows and vistas that fill my frames.
This constellation of diptych plates is selected from an ongoing series that curates chance photography within a fixed format. Stacking out-of-reach landscapes upon portraits of intimate absence, each plate amalgamates fleeting two-frame stories of embodiment and happenstance.
An ode to framing itself both in concept and craft, this series makes a game of juxtaposing and compositing conventions, bringing attention to patterns, motifs and synchronicities that are negotiated within each frame pairing and across the series.
The 9:16 combined aspect ratio of these double-frames echo that of the phone screen used to capture the images on display. Their form and materiality mirror the spandrilled window frames now ubiquitous to our curtainwall-clad built environment. Curtains that hold in, walls that keep out, at once interface and infrastructure to an urban reality that grows in compartmentalization as it shrinks from reach. Caught, layered and refracted within are the many shapes, shadows and reflections that emit from a transient life flowing in between, persistent on bursting through.
Nellie is an artist, researcher and educator with a background in architecture and an interest in lens-based and new media. Her emerging transdisciplinary practice crafts tailored processes by mining the overlaps of storytelling and placemaking. Her research probes at the interfaces of urbanity, identity, collective memory, design policy and public space, championing spatial agency through a lens of play.
Her work with 'elsewhere collective' explores embodiment at the intersections of image, space, narrative and emotion through multimedia installations that straddle expanded cinema, interactive theatre and architectural intervention.
Nellie was born in Tehran and lives in Tkarón:to/Toronto.
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May 6th to May 17th, 2026
918 Bathurst Street, Toronto
Sun and Star Rooms
Hours: Wednesday - Sunday, 12pm to 5pm
Opening reception: Thursday May 7th from 6-9pm
Artist talk: Saturday, May 9th from 1-3pm