Wood does not lie. Every ring, every knot, every uneven grain records exactly how long it took to grow — and at Kostuik Gallery, that honesty is precisely the point. Against the Grain puts two women in a material still widely assumed to belong to men, and lets the wood itself argue the case for why that assumption no longer holds.

Jennifer Kostuik, owner and director of the gallery, built the show around a single, deceptively simple premise: two women, at entirely different points in their careers, working in the same material. Marianne Lovink has been carving wood since 1984, with public art commissions across Toronto and Philadelphia behind her. Katja Zubkova joined the Kostuik roster in 2024, arriving at sculpture after a career on Canada’s High-Performance Biathlon team.

On paper, the pairing reads as contrast. In the gallery, it read as conversation.

What Visitors Noticed

“Guests responded by describing their first impressions of a lively and energetic exhibit,” Kostuik said, reflecting on opening night. Visitors were struck by how rare it is to walk into a show that is entirely sculpture — no paintings, no photographs, just wood, worked two very different ways.

Some lingered over the grain patterns surfacing through Zubkova’s pieces. Others were surprised to learn that Lovink’s sculptures, with their pattern-driven, almost textile-like surfaces, were carved wood at all.

Selling a Medium Still Coded as Male

Kostuik was candid about what it takes to sell a show like this one. Wood carving does not carry the same immediate market instinct as a painting or a large-format photograph, and putting two women at the centre of a medium still coded as a male trade adds its own layer of framing.

“I often point out the medium is male dominated, and the response is a reflection with ‘yes’ following,” she said. What she has watched happen, day after day, is that reflection giving way to something closer to reconsideration — visitors leaving with a sharper sense of how demanding, and how elegant, wood carving can be in the right hands.

Katja Zubkova: Un-Coding Her Own Story

For Zubkova, the show was never only about the finished pieces on the wall. “Meeting collectors in person adds another layer of connection,” she said. “Once a sculpture becomes part of someone’s home or collection, it takes on a life beyond the studio, and I really value being part of that exchange.”

Her wall sculptures carry titles written in binary code, a private language for a very public idea: that people are always, as she put it, “un-coding our own stories.” A career change, a move, a new chapter of motherhood — Zubkova sees all of it as the same quiet work of reinvention, and she trusts a four-letter word in binary to hold more meaning than a paragraph of explanation.

Marianne Lovink: Four Decades In

Lovink, forty years into a practice that has taken her through Toronto, Philadelphia, and Chicago, described the evening in terms that any artist, regardless of stage, would recognize. “Exhibition openings often bring mixed emotions — anticipation, excitement, and, above all, nerves,” she said.

Sharing that particular vulnerability with someone earlier in her own path was, in her words, reassuring rather than diminishing. Lovink was clear-eyed about what she respects in Zubkova’s work, and about the dialogue their pairing created between two very different approaches to the same medium.

The in-person conversations at the reception, she noted, surfaced something no photograph or press mention ever fully delivers: the specific, unscripted reason a particular viewer responds to a particular piece.

A Room Where Two Careers Stood as Equals

What Kostuik built, in the end, was not simply a two-artist show. It was a room where a woman carving since 1984 and a woman two years into her gallery career could stand together and be read as equally serious, equally accomplished, on their own terms.

“I’m proud of the fantastic pieces they both created since early spring,” Kostuik said. “They both worked hard over the summer and were so pleased how their works blended well together.”

Against the Grain remains on view at Kostuik Gallery through October 11.

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Against the Grain: A Gallery, Two Sculptors, and a Shared Material