View Loser, a two-person exhibition with Amanda Boulos
April 28-July 2, 2022
The Bows, Mohkínstsis/Calgary AB
Photos: Katy Whitt Photography
Read the full exhibition text.
View Loser, a collaborative exhibition by Tkaronto/Toronto-based artists Amanda Boulos and Shannon Garden-Smith, is an intersectional conversation between the forms of displacement at the heart of their practices: respectively, the politics of land and politics of housing. This conversation came together over several years of collaborative practice built on the artists’ shared interest in architecture’s ability to sustain lack and loss. Together, Boulos and Garden-Smith explore how architectures can be deployed in the disappearance of certain people and their histories.
Boulos’s paintings depict family memories of Palestinian life, and of her family’s journey fleeing from Palestine to Lebanon in the late 1940s, and its subsequent flight from Lebanon due to the Lebanese Civil War. From Boulos’s millennial perspective, a defining characteristic of the Israeli occupation is the existential logic of the wall. In her paintings, walls often appear in shallow relief of the picture plane—space is punctuated, views are lost. The interruptive function of these walls reverses their solidness, rendering them in the paintings as something akin to voids: ambivalent holes in the viewer’s line of sight.
Garden-Smith extends this project of refusal, reversal, and voiding to the hidden politics of our living spaces, and, by extension, the background conditions of everyday life and its economic underpinnings. Taking décor as her point of entry, Garden-Smith exerts stress on interstitial bits of architecture—its thresholds and margins—and places accents on our habitual experiences of these interstices. Staged as an architectural intervention, Garden-Smith’s arched, threaded rock façade and eccentric window blind sculptures mirror, double, reflect, and reverse the walls, arches, and edifices in Boulos’s paintings. In their precarious dramatization of controlled spaces, they also amplify the paintings’ sense of fugitivity.
Accompanying talks and workshops will feature artists, scholars, activists, and writers working on Palestinian politics, borders, migration, housing insecurity, and loss and lack as artistic tools for world-building.
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I wish to acknowledge the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts and Toronto Arts Council in making this project possible.