Not like the other by Gillian Iles
January 14 – 31, 2026
Reception: Saturday, January 17, 1 – 4pm
Artist will also be in the gallery on January 31, 12 – 5pm.
Not like the other is the counterpart to the one-eyed man is king created in 2024. It continues to explore the nature of difference, division and conflict. Dichotomy and contradiction are implicit.
Othering is a construct.
Born from perceived difference and manufactured division.
It requires bellicose rhetoric and myopic perspective.
Each lens magnifies and validates its existence.
Conflict relies on it.
The other is the target.
Not like the other explores the act of targeting.
The hunting blind is a representation of othering. Placed in a location, it splits a unified reality into hunter and hunted. It imposes a division, manufacturing inside versus outside and encourages the act of targeting. The hunter remains invisible, the quarry often unsuspecting. Only one side is complicit.
the one-eyed man is king enveloped the viewer within an expanse containing several camouflaged hunting blinds all aimed at the viewer with the viewer finding themself the target.
Not like the other presents the other point of view - gazing out of the blind. The viewer is implicated into taking the other side - the view of the marksman; the experience of inside looking out at a selection of targets immersed within the wilderness. Targets are framed in the geometric shapes akin to looking out through a blind’s shooting slits.
Othering requires fabrication and manipulation of perception. Targets are not predetermined. They require deliberate selection and a method of presentation that portray them as different and worthy of suspicion and vitriol.
The targeted images presented are inherently random, benign, ordinary moments. Framing deliberately creates a zone of interest and implied target. Perception shifts, narratives are redirected and vulnerability or malicious intent is invented.
The installation presents the moment before the conflict. Wilderness and illusory moments find occasional shared tangents that hint at the potential for compatibility, but are outweighed by the incongruity of mood, scale and media. Differences are manifest and objects of normalcy sit with an air of precarity.
Not like the other and the one-eyed man is king will be presented together for the first time, as originally envisioned, along with additional content in a solo exhibition, Glorious Catastrophe at Koffler Arts. Opening March 26. www.kofflerarts.org
Since 1997 Gillian has exhibited in public institutions, artist-run centres and commercial galleries in Europe, USA, South America and Canada.
Ideas draw from geopolitical events and their relationship to individual experience. She finds commentary within power dynamics, social constructs and systems of belief related to colonial Western culture; particularly their manufactured existence, illusionary value, tenuous persistence and questionable motives. Contradiction and precarity are relevant at all stages – within idea, material choices and methods of presentation. Gillian’s practice spans painting, sculpture, constructions, sound & video. Installations merge real and illusionary space into a composite of realities and points of view. Often large-scale, her installations respond to the opportunities of a space and ways to implicate the viewer. She is a founding member of two artist collective galleries in Toronto - Propeller and Loop, and has been with Red Head collective since 2012. She teaches at OCADU and Sheridan College in Canada.
