Shannon Garden-Smith (she/her) is an artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada of Scottish and Irish settler heritage. She completed an MFA from the University of Guelph and Honours BA from the University of Toronto. She is a current doctoral student in Visual Art at York University. Working in sculpture, installation and expanded photo practice, she has exhibited nationally and internationally with recent projects at OCAD U’s Onsite Gallery (Tkaronto/Toronto, ON), Nuit Blanche (Tkaronto/Toronto, ON), the Goldfarb Gallery at York University (Tkaronto/Toronto, ON), Centre Clark (Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal, QC), Patel Brown Gallery (Tkaronto/Toronto, ON), Art Museum at the University of Toronto, The Bows (Mohkínstsis/Calgary, AB), Oxygen Art Centre (Nelson, BC), Franz Kaka (Tkaronto/Toronto, ON), Gallery TPW (Tkaronto/Toronto, ON), Pumice Raft (Tkaronto/Toronto, ON), and TIER: The Institute for Endotic Research (Berlin) among others. Garden-Smith is a finalist for the 2025 Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts (TFVA) Artist Prize. Her work has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Ontario Graduate Scholarship, Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council.
Working primarily in sculpture and installation, Garden-Smith focuses on the material-social impact of the surfaces that clad our contemporary built world. Often using unconventional materials such as sand and gelatin, her work foregrounds an understanding of matter premised on interdependency, flux, and the finitude of resources—values informed by intersectional feminist frameworks.
Through a slow, repetitive process that re-visibilizes how the day-to-day architectures of our lives become naturalized through repeated exposure, her work re-sensitizes us to the labour that sustains our everyday. Engendering slippages between surface and structure, her work examines labour, identity, and power in human-built architectures, seeking to intervene into capitalist, productivist modes of telling time and modes of relation.