What I Forgot is Better than Whatever They Remember by Natalie King
What I Forgot is Better Than Whatever They Remember, a solo exhibition from Toronto-based artist Natalie King is a visual and physical return, a constellation of memory, language, and spirit across time. This series of seven star-shaped paintings forms a sky map: seven visual portals for seven generations, grounded in the good life and the Seven Grandfather Teachings. Each work opens toward a different kind of remembering, personal, ancestral, embodied, and emerging.
Presented as part of the 2025 Creatives in Residence series, a signature program of Ontario Culture Days—Ontario’s free, annual fall celebration of arts and culture.
What I Forgot is Better Than Whatever They Remember, a solo exhibition from Toronto-based artist Natalie King is a visual and physical return, a constellation of memory, language, and spirit across time. This series of seven star-shaped paintings forms a sky map: seven visual portals for seven generations, grounded in the good life and the Seven Grandfather Teachings. Each work opens toward a different kind of remembering, personal, ancestral, embodied, and emerging.
Made for the Temiskaming Art Gallery in Haileybury for Ontario Culture Days, this exhibition unfolds on the Ontario side of the river, close to King’s family roots in New Liskeard and Haileybury, and across from their homelands in Algonquin Anishinaabeg territory in the Timiskaming region of Quebec, Timiskaming First Nation. These paintings weave together both sides of the river, tracing kinship lines, memory routes, and cultural continuance.
King’s grandfathers first language was Anishinaabemowin. That language lives in her work, as rhythm, as echo, as intention. King says of the works:
"think of the land, and the highways that brought us north and south and back again. I think of words that don’t translate, and of the silences that fill the in-between spaces between northern Ontario, Quebec, East Gwillimbury, and Toronto."
These works are not about grief, but about continuation. Stars become teachers, flames become messengers, hair becomes lineage. King states: “Painting is my way of listening across generations - of gathering what was never lost, only waiting to be held again. These seven works are offerings, coordinates, and reminders: we are still here, still speaking, still becoming.”
What I Forgot is Better Than Whatever They Remember is a constellation of offerings; seven star-shaped paintings that shimmer with memory and motion. "It is a celebration of freedom, of presence, of becoming. In returning home, I do not seek closure, but expansion. Through this work, I continue a lineage of resistance and joy, imagining futures where Indigenous, queer, and Two-Spirit people are not only remembered, but revered."
Presented as part of the 2025 Creatives in Residence series, a signature program of Ontario Culture Days—Ontario’s free, annual fall celebration of arts and culture.
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