
Faculty of Art
Drawing and Painting
Meet the Artist
Connor
Rothe
Painting
“You’re Like Water, I’m Like Glue explores dissociation as the loss of self/reality, as a state of complete mental detachment. Mirroring sentiments of loss, loneliness, disembodiment, and groundlessness, dissociation is more than a detached lens. It envelopes one’s sense of reality in a gauzy maelstrom. Displacing identity and conceptions of the real, the dissociator is left as something less than alone. They’re left feeling as though their skin is no longer theirs, that their memories are some obscured dream, that the ground they’re standing on was never more than imagined. Presenting external landscapes as sites of internal detachment, my paintings attempt to mimic the dissociator’s reality. Moments of realization/recollection flicker in and out of focus in lapses of light, memory, deja vu, dreams, and the digital. Entirely painted in acrylic with an airbrush, there is no physical connection between me and the canvas/ground. The lack of physicality, both in the process and effect of airbrushing, relates to the work’s disconnect.”

Connor Rothe (b. 2001, Waterloo) is a visual artist based in Toronto. He explores painting through his experience with derealization (a dissociative disorder that makes one feel mentally detached from their surroundings). His paintings are both photographic and blurry. In this, he attempts to straddle the line between real and unreal.
University of Waterloo
Architecture
Major Transferred, 2019
Drawing and Painting Acrylic Painting
2024, In the Church of My Heart, the Choir is in Flames
Remote Gallery, Toronto, ON
2024, Static (duo)
Youthful Vengeance, Toronto, ON
2024, Circles
222 Spadina Ave., Toronto, ON
2022, Selected Works (solo)
Waterloo City Hall, Waterloo, ON
2022, Unrest
1132 Dundas St. E, Toronto, ON
2021, Archive of Merit: From the OSA to OCADU
Ada Slaight Gallery, Toronto, ON
2022, Takao Tanabe Scholarship
OCAD University
