Naoise Halloran-Mackay and Felix Oliver Canopy

8 – 29 August 2026

Sutton Projects is pleased to present Canopy, a two-person exhibition by Naoise Halloran-Mackay and Felix Oliver.

In Canopy, images and structures are constructed to resemble familiar architectural forms while suspending their expected function. Windows, openings, enclosures and façades fall short of themselves. Detached from any complete structure, these openings suggest movement, visibility and access while withholding each in turn. A window promises a view elsewhere but refuses arrival, an entrance implies passage while remaining impassable. Canopy draws upon a recognisable architectural vocabulary only to subtly displace it. Familiar spaces become strangely misaligned, their internal logic skewed through repetition, flatness or interruption. What initially appears ordered gradually reveals itself as unstable, producing a persistent tension between recognition and operation. Architecture is staged rather than inhabited, becoming a vessel for associative imagery, half-remembered spaces and imagined interiors.

Rather than offering fixed destinations, Halloran-Mackay and Oliver construct environments that remain deliberately unresolved. Incompleteness operates here not as absence, but as a generative condition, transforming architectural forms into spaces of projection and possibility. Their works invite intimacy while frustrating completion, sustaining a space between revelation and concealment. Together, the exhibition becomes an unfolding conversation of openings and closings, a landscape of partial thresholds where the familiar gives way to something dreamlike, elusive and just beyond reach.

Click here for the exhibition text “A Gateless Gate” by Hugh L. Magnus

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Artist Biographies

Naoise Halloran-Mackay‘s practice explores intersections of architecture, memory, and the natural world. Drawing on a background in residential carpentry, he combines ornamental woodcraft techniques and painting to investigate relationships between materials, images, and the environments from which they are derived, creating scenes and spaces that exist beyond immediate experience.

Living and working in Naarm/Melbourne, Naoise’s recent presentations include Shelter (solo exhibition), Firstdraft, Sydney, 2025 and The Space of Light (two-person exhibition), Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery, Melbourne, 2024. Recent group exhibitions include House, Animal House Fine Art, Melbourne, 2026; After the Earth, Bett Gallery, Hobart, 2026 and In My Prime, Sullivan + Strumpf, Melbourne, 2025. In 2025 Naoise was awarded a Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship (Shark Island Institute) through the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. He is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts (Painting) and Bendigo TAFE (Construction).

Felix Oliver‘s practice is structured around an examination into how framing devices can become transitionary facades or unstable memory boxes. Working primarily with timber, he is interested in how sculpture can serve as an entry point into the already-crafted enclosure of the image.

Oliver lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne. He graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts (Photography) in 2025, where he is currently undertaking an Honours degree in Fine Art. Oliver’s recent presentations include Develop, Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh), Melbourne, 2026; Darebin Art Prize, Bundoora Homestead, Melbourne, 2026, as well as curated group exhibitions at TCB Gallery, Blindside Gallery, Fiona and Sydney Myer Gallery, and 138 Gallery.