Shannon Garden-Smith (she/her) is an uninvited settler of Scottish, Irish, and British heritage and an artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. She completed an MFA at the University of Guelph (2017) and a BA at the University of Toronto. She has recently shown work with The Bows (Mohkínstsis/Calgary, AB), Oxygen Art Centre (Nelson, BC), Franz Kaka (Tkaronto/Toronto, ON), Gallery TPW (Tkaronto/Toronto, ON), Christie Contemporary (Tkaronto/Toronto, ON), Pumice Raft (Tkaronto/Toronto, ON), TIER: The Institute for Endotic Research (Berlin), 8-11 Gallery (Tkaronto/Toronto, ON) and elsewhere. Her work is permanently installed in Unity Health, a Toronto clinic. Garden-Smith’s projects have been supported by the 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 materialist 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.