What happens when, instead of just looking and observing art gallery exhibits, you’re allowed to touch, move, make, create, and play with the exhibits in an art gallery? And, what if the focus is shifted from adult intellectualism to children at play?
That’s what Colourful Pararchutes: Imagining Alternative Futures Through the Power of Play offers at Toronto’s Power Plant Gallery. The exhibit opened April 25, 2026, and runs through the summer until September 7.
“Colourful Parachutes is for audiences of all ages, while foregrounding children’s potential as creative agents and future-makers,” says Adelina Vlas, Artistic Director of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in a statement. “By centring play as a critically creative force, the exhibition reconsiders how imagination, responsibility, and care can be shaped in and beyond the gallery.”
One of the main themes underpinning Colourful Parachutes is looking at and helping to develop the relationship that young people have to the future. Nurturing a relationship to the natural world is crucial for the future of all humanity.
The title of the show comes from Brazilian Indigenous philosopher and environmental activist Ailton Krenak’s 2019 book Ideas to Postpone the End of the World. In it, Krenak asks, “What sort of world are you boxing and wrapping for future generations? You keep talking about another world, but have you asked the generations of tomorrow if the world you’re building is the world they want?”
The entire gallery has been turned into a playground of interactive exhibits and more, featuring the work of Canadian and international artists.
Colourful Parachutes
Here’s a look at what’s you can expect. Each room includes interactive elements. For a walk through, you can take a look at our Instagram/Facebook reel here.
Ana Mendieta (Cuba/United States): Parachute
Ana Mendieta (1948 to 1985) was a multidisciplinary artist whose work spanned painting, drawing, photography, film/video, sculpture, and site-specific pieces. When she first graduated from college in the 1970s, she taught at an elementary school in Iowa City.
The exhibit includes a video she created of her students playing the parachute game, where, in a circle, they hold on to the edges of a piece of material, and work cooperatively to inflate it like a parachute.
Claire Greenshaw (Canada): A Decision Between Us, 2026
Claire Greenshaw is a visual artist and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Visual Arts at York University, Toronto, and her work and research focuses on feminist approaches, and how we experience time in this Anthropocene era.
She’s created a wonderfully detailed depiction of the Athabasca Glacier icefield in Alberta that covers a wall of the gallery. There’s an interactive element to it, however — the floor in front of it is strewn with erasers, and visitors are invited to erase parts of it.
Will people erase the depiction of the glacier, just as, in real life, we are collectively erasing the glacier from existence?
“Yes, people do get into it and erase it,” says Greenshaw. “I think there’s a kind of tension.”
The piece works on several layers. As the artist points out, the work itself, in all its wonderful detail, is a demonstration of labour. It took Claire four weeks to complete. “I’m interested in time,” she says. The glacier is also a witness to time.
The work becomes a collective endeavour as the picture itself disappears, but the marks from the graphite pencil remain on the walls. The medium of pencil and eraser, while manipulated with sophistication in the drawing, is one that everyone, including children, understands how to use.
“I love the pencil because it’s so ubiquitous, and economical.”
The pencils, and the erasers, as she points out, are themselves changed through both the creation and dissolution of the work.
Leisure (Meredith Carruthers & Susannah Wesley) (Canada): The Chrysalis and the Butterfly, 2025
Leisure is a collaborative art practice founded in 2004 by Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley. The Montreal-based artist duo has created a play room where children can let their ideas loose.
Outside of a few wall-mounted images with collages that reference the work of artist Barbara Hepworth, the space is given over to two play areas. Hepworth was mother to Simon Nicholson, an artist who together with economist Hazel Henderson, gave a presentation at the First Global Conference on the Future in 1980 in Toronto. To combat the eco-anxiety of their era, the pair suggested getting hands-on — talking to people, working with people, and immersing yourself in natural materials.
In one, rolls of paper and cardboard, along with a box filled with cutters and other utensils, invites kids to cut, shape, and create things like origami figures and other imaginative shapes.
The other incorporates sand, paper, and water, with shovels and other tools to play with the sand, including ceramic bowls where you can play with paper pulp. There are small “trees” that can be set into the sand area.
The artists research-based practice explores the idea of working in friendship, and using play to counteract children’s climate anxiety.
Sassa Linklater (Canada): As long as the rivers flow (2020) / Tobias Linklater (Canada): We will listen (2020)
Sassa Linklater is Omaskêko Ininu from Moose Cree First Nation and Sugpiaq from the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions in Alaska. Tobias Linklater is Sugpiaq from Alaska and Omaskêko Cree from James Bay, ON, currently majoring in Art History at Carleton University in Ottawa and minoring in Anthropology.
At a video station, kids can chill for a bit to watch two stop motion videos the pair created as teenagers. Sassa Linklater’s video As long as the rivers flow revolves around the meaning of treaties and treaty relations, specifically the Two Row Wampum (1613 Gaswendah) agreement between the Indigenous peoples and European settlers, which specified reciprocal care and respect “as long as the sun shines, the rivers flow, and the grass grows”.
Tobias Linklater’s We will listen follows a young person who looks for guidance from an eagle. It’s a mythological story that takes the child through time and space via a water portal, towards a momentous vision of the future.
Rivane Neuenschwander (Brazil): dream.lab (2024–25)
Rivane Neuenschwander is known for participatory works which involve the viewer directly, often a combination of games and experiments.
dream.lab takes up a whole room, offering a kind of otherworldly space lit with shimmery disco balls. It’s set up in a sort of maze created with screens, offering stations where shadow puppet plays can be created — and a wall rack full of puppet shapes to choose from. The colours tend towards blues and greens, with black ornamentation in organic and intricate shapes.
Another wall offers a chalk board, and just down from it, a table set with a xylophone for musical experiments.
Harold Offeh (United Kingdom): The Mothership Collective 2.0 (2025) (co-commissioned by BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK, and Tramway, Glasgow, UK)
Ghanaian British artist Harold Offeh’s works span a range of media that includes performance, video, photography, learning, and social arts practice. His The Mothership Collective takes over another whole room of the exhibit with a striking colour scheme of black, yellow, and silver. The walls and floor are black. The floor is punctuated with silvery circles and bubble balls to play with, transparent but with just enough pink sparkle in each to create an effervescent effect. Yellow curved benches invite visitors to sit and play.
Music is play!
Along one wall, there are a number of percussive and acoustic musical instruments to try out. They include tongue drums, Data Duo Synthesizers, which allow two people to play together, mini drum machines, kalimbas, Casiotone keyboards, shakers and other hand percussion, and a fascinating Stylophone Theramin. The Theramin allows you to make sounds via your proximity to the instrument, without touching it, and including various dials for tone and other parameters.
The other walls feature images, including a futuristic Toronto skyscape, and three video stations that explain Offeh’s inspiration for the installation, including the psychedelic imaginations of artists like musician Sun Ra and writer Octavia Butler.
A magnetic poetry wall lets you arrange and rearrange words to create new meanings.
Temitayo Ogunbiyi (United States/Nigeria): You will find Lagos in Jand Living (Final Destination: the T-dot), 2023-26
Temitayo Ogunbiyi’s work explores the links between the environment, line, and representation.
His installation for the show is an interactive sculpture consisting of large, organically curved steel bars wrapped in manila rope, made from the leaves of the abaca plant. The shapes resemble curving vines, or perhaps a winding stream bed. It’s meant to be explored in a very physical sense — you can climb on it, walk on it, swing from it however you like. (With the caveat that parents must supervise their children while playing on it.)
Temitayo lives in Lagos, and she was inspired by the homemade gyms she saw. Places to play, as she notes, are not always so easy to find, but children have the fundamental right to move and play freely.
Robin Rhode (South Africa/Germany): Paries Pictus — Draw the Waves, 2015
Robin Rhode’s work uses photography, performance, drawing, painting, and sculpture. He often creates large scale drawings on walls, typically in public spaces.
His piece for the show takes up a long hallway. Robin has screen printed several ships that flow along each wall. He then collaborated with school children to draw waves around the boats, using huge crayons that he had specially made. The crayons are so large that it’s difficult for any one child to wield them, encouraging cooperation.
Note that, for the purposes of the show, the crayons are on display, but are somewhat fragile, so they’re in a display case. Anyone who wishes to draw can go upstairs in the gallery to the Creative Hub and contribute to a colouring sheet that was also designed by Rhodes.
Details
- Find more details about the show, which is on display until September 7, [HERE].
There are many other special events planned during the exhibition, including a Speakers Series in June, papermaking workshop with artist Raoul Oolou in July, creative workshops, child-run tours, and much more, including a long weekend drop-in session.
Power Kids: August Long Weekend Drop-in
On Mon Aug 3, 2026 kids aged 7 to 12 (with younger and older siblings also welcome) are invited to the gallery for a FREE drop in session from 12 p.m. until 4 p.m.
- Find details [HERE].
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