A multi-site exhibition across Tkaronto.
5 – 31 August, 2022
Featuring works by Sidi Chen, Jenna Reid + Cassandra Myers, Laura Margaret Ramsey, Shonee, Sarah Holloway, and Maria Simmons
Co-presented by Trinity Square Video, Lakeshore Arts, Whippersnapper Gallery, Critical Distance Centre for Curators, and SpaceMakerII.
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Ecologies & Cosmologies presents the 2022 Themed Commissions, which were produced over a summer residency. This year’s theme invites projects that explore and critique different forms of interdependency, networks of life, and destabilize fixed entities/identities/borders through technological, ecological or cosmological metaphors.
The selected projects explore various topics, including; networks of care; spiritual, physical and digital connections in human and nonhuman relationships; environmental speculative fiction; and deconstructing trauma through ecological metaphors;
In reference to the theme of interconnectedness, the selected projects take place in different venues across Tkaronto, culminating in a constellation of public-facing spaces, inextricably linked to the structure of the city and bringing together a number of local artist-run communities.
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LOCATIONS
401 Richmond St., Toronto, ON
Trinity Square Video (Vitrine)
First floor, Hallway.
Opening hours: Tuesday-Saturday 12-6
Critical Distance Center for Curators (CDCC)
First floor, suite 122
Opening hours: Tuesday-Saturday 12-5
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SpaceMakerII, 100 Palmerston St., Toronto ON
Located in a detached garage in an alleyway between Euclid avenue and Palmerston avenue.
Opening hours: Wednesday-Saturday 12-6 (Friday 12-9)
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Whippersnapper Gallery, 594 Dundas St.W, Toronto ON
Store-front window installation.
Opening hours: Thursday-Saturday, 6-10pm
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Lakeshore Arts, 2422 Lake Shore Blvd W, Etobicoke, ON
Opening hours: Tuesday-Friday 12-6pm
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[SEE MAP OF ALL PROJECTS + VENUES]
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The Themed Commission is made possible by the EQ Bank.
Special thanks to:
Laura Margaret Ramsey (she/her) is a Toronto-based scholar, imaging specialist and artist. Ramsey is known for her use of data visualisation & sonification to explore the natural world, imaging processes and computational awareness. Her work is heavily influenced by the structure of the archive, the preservation of obsolete technology, science fiction and the algorithmic approaches in data management. She holds an MA from Toronto Metropolitan University, and a BDes from Alberta University of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited recently with Bio-Creation Station hosted by MIT Media Lab (USA), Fragments of Sonic Extinction (Munich, Germany), and InterAccess with Vector Festival 2022 (Toronto, Canada).
Shonee (born Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes) is a Montreal-based Costa Rican-Canadian digital media artist. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Film Animation from Concordia University, where she is currently an MFA candidate in Intermedia. She is the 2021 recipient of the Emerging Digital Artists Award and has presented work at MUTEK, National Film Board of Canada, Société des arts technologiques and Filmgate Miami. Growing up on the edge of a rainforest in Costa Rica nourishes her creative practice as her work strives to resurrect the meaning of nature’s place in her own life now as both an urbanite and multidisciplinary artist. Within the virtual worlds she creates, 3D embodiments of organisms borrow shapes, colours, and stories from plants and animals within our own world, while remaining singular. This conscious decision is intended to inspire a newly discovered appreciation of the endangered, non-human world that humanity often takes for granted as her portrayals seek to embody humankind’s seemingly objective and narrow misunderstanding of nature in this time of ecological crisis.
Sidi Chen is a traveling queer artist whose practice addresses the intersectionality of the body, community space, and the land. For the creative process, Chen empathizes the body as a unit of measurement, a vessel of relationships, a repository of experience, and an instrument for creativity. Through his interdisciplinary research crossing arts to science and social movements, Chen’s interested in how the embodied experience informs the relations and agencies of the bodies that are human, ecological, and planetary.
Maria Simmons (she/they) is a hybrid artist living in Guelph, ON. She investigates potentialized environments through the creation of hybrid sculpture and installation. Her work embraces contamination as an act of collaboration. She collects garbage, grows mushrooms, ferments plants, and nurtures fruit flies. She makes art that eats itself. Maria holds an MFA from the University of Waterloo and a BFA from McMaster University. Her work has recently been exhibited at Xpace, The Plumb, Ed Video Media Art Centre, and the Hamilton Artist Inc. She has completed residencies at Mustarinda (Finland), BioArt Society (Finland), Silent Barn (NYC), and Factory Media Centre (Hamilton, ON).
Sarah Holloway has been fostering “twin-flame” interests in computation and handi-craft while completing her studies in furniture design at the Rhode Island School of Design. There, she learned fine woodworking, metalworking, and weaving while teaching herself computer science. With an education in craft, she is curious about how older ways of knowing embodied in traditional craft disciplines can be used in the field of computation and computational theory.
Jenna Reid is the current Artistic Director at Kickstart Disability Arts & Culture, and the board president of the Contemporary Textile Studio Co-operative. Jenna is a fiber artist who works primarily with the practices of quilting, natural dyes, and protest art as a way to engage with activist based aesthetics. Jenna has completed residencies on Toronto Island with the Feminist Art Conference, at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and has exhibited her work and presented on panels in Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia. Jenna completed a studio-based PhD in Critical Disability Studies at York University.
Cassandra Myers (they/she/he) is a queer, non-binary, crippled, mad, South-Asian-Italian performance poet and counsellor from Tkaronto, Ontario. Raised in the slam poetry community for seven years, Cassandra has earned titles such as the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word Champion. As he transitions to the page, her work has won the ARC Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year Award 2021 and the Reader’s Choice Award. Their first collection of poems, Smash the Headlights, is forthcoming from Write Bloody North Publishing.