Love Letter to the Father I Wish I Knew

Magida El-Kassis — Members' Gallery

Love Letter to the Father I Wish I Knew draws from Magida El-Kassis’s family photographic archives to reconstruct the childhood of her father, who left Lebanon at eighteen and rarely spoke about the life he left behind. When she asked about his early years, he offered only fragments, just enough to let her imagination complete the story. She grew up picturing him beneath cedar trees, running through the mountains with his siblings, carefree and light. She also sensed another version: a boy carrying responsibility, growing up too quickly under the weight of circumstance.

Through collage, weaving, and natural dyeing, El-Kassis reworks family photographs to give these fragments a second life. Threads are hand-dyed with materials found across Lebanon, creating a material connection between where she lives and where her family comes from. Weaving becomes a way of reconstructing what is incomplete: bringing together fragments of memory, inheritance, grief and imagination. Something, she has come to understand, is not always complete until it has been broken down and rebuilt.

The work is an act of longing and care – a love letter to a father she never fully knew, and to the parts of oneself one inherits, loses and continues to search for.

Magida El-Kassis is a Toronto, lens-based artist whose practice blends traditional and experimental approaches to image-making. She studied at the School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa (SPAO), where she developed an interest in the ways photography can be used to explore memory, identity and personal histories. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally and has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the City of Ottawa.

Gallery hours (as published): Tuesday – Friday, 11:00 AM – 5:00 PM; Saturday, 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM; Closed on all public holidays.