Shannon Garden-Smith

Shannon Garden-Smith, Snail-work (for the lake), Unfixed, pigmented sand, 98’ x 22’, Curated by Danica Pinteric for Nuit Blanche, Tkaronto/Toronto, 2024

Made of unfixed, vibrantly dyed sand, Snail-work (for the lake) is a monumentally-scaled floor installation that recreates historical marbling patterns at an immersive scale. Presented as part of Nuit Blanche (2024) audiences were invited to move through the work, gently interacting with the pattern – disrupting, unmaking and remaking it in the process. This project emerges from the artist’s research on sand, which links sand extraction with settler colonial systems of knowing and development. By volume, sand is the second‐most consumed material in the world, and as the primary ingredient in concrete and glass, it forms the very world around us. Astoundingly, this material that is associated with infinitude is beginning to “run out.” The ways that sand is conceived of, extracted, valued and used, underscore the unsustainable practices that underpin the contemporary world. As people move through the sand, they create new, unanticipated patterns while also undoing the original pattern. This process of collective remaking occurs through intimate, embodied contact surfacing questions of sustainability, truth and care.

https://www.shannongardensmith.com/snail-work-for-the-lake

Shannon Garden-Smith, Tracks and traces and changes (Sand Prints), Back-lit digital prints, 36” x 90” each, 2024, Curated by Clara Halpern, The Golfarb Gallery, York University, Tkaronto/Toronto. 

With this project for York University’s Goldfarb Gallery public vitrines, Garden-Smith continues an engagement with sand (the primary ingredient in concrete). Tracks and traces and changes emerges out of a practice of walking or moving with land/sand, following it through official archives as well as through the form of the built city. In this series of images, Garden-Smith proposes that moving with leads to a new engagement with buried, scattered, and erased entanglements with land. To move with is to reflect on the ways that settler colonialism has shaped the city, and the untenable extractive flows of geo-ecological matter that comprise our built world. Focussing on anonymous traces of touch left by human and more-than-human inhabitants of the city, Tracks and traces and changes is a visual invitation attuned to the ground, to our movement over and with it, and to an often-overlooked material—sand.

https://www.shannongardensmith.com/tracks-and-traces-and-changes-sand-prints

Shannon Garden-Smith, Upright is fine, but downright is where I am, Artist’s book containing 30 double-sided 5” x 7” archival prints, 2021. Produced with the support of Gallery TPW, Toronto ON

This book project continued Garden-Smith’s ongoing project documenting shoe treads printed in sidewalk concrete and road paint. Bound in a flocked clamshell box, the book is structured as an accordion fold-out that holds 30 double-sided prints, or 60 unique images. For each image that is immediately visible within the book, a second image remains latent on its reverse. However—tucked into slits on each accordion-fold page—the double sided prints are designed to be removed from the book structure, inviting countless re-arrangements. 

Imaging traces of touch that result from movement through the city, Garden-Smith’s photo series trains our looking at our cities’ most pedestrian concrete surfaces, which are comprised primarily of sand. The project lingers on sand—a material we connect deeply with time and the infinite—just as we find ourselves inconceivably but demonstrably on the brink of exhausting this resource.

https://www.shannongardensmith.com/upright-is-fine-but-downright-is-where-i-am-book

Jenine Marsh

Jenine Marsh, Fountain for the Thirteenth Hour, 2024

For the last three years my work has been dedicated to the investigation of the civic fountain as a site of coin-wishing.

Several recent exhibitions in Canada and the US presented large-scale (12-14’ diameter) concrete and mixed-media fountain forms containing variously altered coins. This image is of an installation titled Fountain for the Thirteenth Hour at the Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery at York University in 2024.

https://www.jeninemarsh.com/work/goldfarb.html

Jenine Marsh, Wellspring (Nuit Blanche, 2023), is a project which altered Toronto’s largest civic square. Nuit Blanche is a 12-hour exhibition, which nearly one-million people attended in 2023. Lifting the large concrete paving stones to reveal the decades of detritus hidden beneath, the work also incorporated two street-level fountains, which the public used as improvised coin-wishing sites.  

https://www.jeninemarsh.com/work/wellspring.html

Jenine Marsh, New Wishes, 2026 

A recent exhibition, new wishes, at De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, UK, involved a large bisected concrete fountain basin, containing pump-churned assemblages of water, bronze-cast coins, recycled vessels, and urban detritus. The exhibition engaged with coin-wishing as a subversion of value and civic belonging.  

https://www.jeninemarsh.com/work/newwishes.html

Angel Callander

Selected Publications

Selected talks and public programs

Selected exhibitions (as curator)

  • Resurrected in Times of Need, solo exhibition by Jenine Marsh, Apr 11 - 29, 2024, at Ashley, Berlin

    Press Release with Exhibition Text

     Art Viewer, Contemporary Art Library, Kuba Paris
     Press: Nina Hanz, Resurrected in Times of Need: Jenine Marsh at Ashley Berlin, for Passe-Avant, 23 June 2024.
    Jenine Marsh’s sculptural practice examines the shared experience of end-stage capitalism. Using elements of the everyday such as coins, flowers, newspaper, and purses along with materials that signify the labour of the built environment like concrete and bronze, Marsh highlights how economic, social, and architectural realities are tightly bound to each other. With a distinct interest in historical and literary conceptions of utopia, what often comes through is an equal consideration for the past as for the future. An overview of her artistic work reveals a poetic, cohesive feminist and anti-capitalist insight into value, agency, and mortality, evaluated through processes of research, physical contact, and personal resistance.
    In this new solo exhibition, Resurrected in Times of Need, Marsh creates a site-specific installation that addresses systems of value and memorialization, particularly related to the history of Berlin. Looking closely at the relief sculptures at the Soviet Memorial in Treptower Park, the graphic figuration of a strong, idealized proletariat is shot through with the elements of Marsh’s material sensibilities. Disembodied and sculpted in the familiar, civic medium of concrete, the forms disclose the urgency and inadequacy of their material. As the show’s title suggests, despair, optimism, nostalgia, and forgetting are cyclical parts of the collective unconscious, while Marsh’s sculptural process mirrors historical materialism where the past, present, and future may become tactile and interactive.
    This exhibition was generously supported by Canada Council for the Arts and Botschaft von Kanada, Berlin.

  • Intravenous Dove, solo exhibition by Andrew Harding, Feb 8 - Apr 20, 2024, at Blouin Division, Toronto

    Press: Sophia Oppel, Deferred Promise, in Cornelia Magazine #16 (Fall 2024).
    Andrew Harding (b. 1995) is a Métis project-based artist in Toronto, whose works explore hybridity through sculpture using found imagery and fabricated forms. Intravenous Dove is the spiritual successor to Hardings previous project, Not All Dogs Go to Heaven (2022). Emerging from an exploration of contemporary angst and accepting the unknown, these new works meditate on the signals and symbols of determination.
    Using familiar iconography of daily life, often passed over without much thought, the works in this exhibition draw attention to our proximity to, and distance from, everyday occurrences and motifs that we take for granted. Looking to the physical and theoretical functions of support structures, Harding foregrounds the various mechanics of how his pieces are presented in, and interact with space. There is a reverent quality to the works, appearing salient and votive, as well as referential and mysterious. Essentially, they evoke ways in which we consider sacred value in times of unrest. Amidst the precious and the uncertain, Intravenous Dove is an infusion of what it means to carry on.

  • Will o' Wisp, solo exhibition by Amanda Boulos, Sept 21 - Nov 4, 2023, at Blouin Division, Toronto
    Artist talk: Nov 4, 2023.
    Amanda Boulos is a Mississauga-born Palestinian artist and educator based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Engaging with personal and national oral narratives from Palestine, Lebanon, and Canada, Boulos explores how the Palestinian Diaspora is constantly undergoing what philosopher Catherine Malabou calls “unprecedented metamorphosis,” a metamorphosis that is capable of abandoning a burdened body or identity to allow a new form to emerge. Throughout her painting practice, Boulos abstracts and transforms oral narratives by fragmenting their environments, allegorizing their fates, and re-envisioning them into symbolic representations. Her paintings are an investigation into and reflection on the plasticity of her, her family’s, and her people’s perceptions, histories, and lives.
    In Will o’ Wisp, Boulos also presents a series of ‘smash paintings’ on paper. These smash paintings replicate the intention of a Rorschach test, where the symmetrical image prompts an invitation for interpretation. Boulos takes images she’s familiar with and ‘smashes’ them, skewing the original subject, and doubling it, to reveal a new transformed image and with it fresh, even lucid visual interpretations.