Public Art at Evergreen
Toronto
2024
How do you listen? What do you hear? Nestled in the Don River ravines amidst urban trails and the Don Valley Parkway, Dastgāh is a sound sculpture that asks visitors to open their ears and listen differently. Created by the brother and sister duo Mani Mazinani and Sanaz Mazinani, the instrument takes its title from the Farsi term “dastgāh,” and can be literally translated as a “hand” (dast) and “gāh” (way) or “set of directions,” a modal system that serves as the foundation for composition and improvisation in Iranian music.
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Public Art at Evergreen
Toronto
2023
Toggling between past, present, and future, Toronto-based artist Jawa El Khash’s project Nature’s Algorithm comes to life in two ways, exploring time, space, and memory through digitally generated holograms presented in an indoor installation, and in an online experience. Illustrating the mathematical algorithm underlying plant life, the works reveal forgotten species existing on the grounds of the Evergreen Brick Works, imagining a diverse future ecosystem.
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Various Locations
Toronto
2022
Stories and Storefronts explores brick-and-mortar stores as records of movement of cultural communities across Toronto. The exhibition focuses on the changing neighbourhood of East Danforth and its diasporas, inviting artists with immigrant backgrounds—Sarindar Dhaliwal, Mani Mazinani, Waard Ward, and Shellie Zhang—to animate immigrant-owned shop windows and storefronts in the community through sculptural and sound installations. The project brings personal and family stories to life, connecting places with the experiences that have shaped the city and generating new, cross-cultural alliances between businesses, artists, and residents.
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Public Art at Evergreen
Toronto
2022
This mural by Toronto-based artist Sarah Davidson weaves together timeless and familiar features of the Brick Works’s local ecosystem and ecology. Here, a milk snake meanders under the wing of a swallowtail butterfly as the eyes of a gray tree frog observe a snapping turtle—all the while remaining somewhat obscured in their tangled web of natural forms. Their inter-connectedness makes a vital and complex reference to nature’s intricate network and prompts the question: who’s seeing who, and how?
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Public Art at Evergreen
Toronto
2022
In her outdoor photographic installation, Roots, Toronto-based artist Sandra Brewster explores the long history of Black presence in the urban wilderness. Developed during her artist residency at Evergreen Brick Works, the photographs document the area’s plant life in ways that reflect on unceded territories, diasporic migrations, and the need to foster safe, outdoor experiences for Black communities. Brewster’s images are embedded along the Belt Line Trail, greeting visitors as they explore the valley.
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Erin Stump Projects
Toronto
2022
Through the sunroof, two hands reach in unison for the night sky, cigarettes loosely balanced between their fingers. You can just make out the tiny fires as they smoulder, inches above the moving car’s glinting shell. The scene, from Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s film Drive My Car (2021), is an intimate moment between not two, but three of the stirring road movie’s protagonists: a grieving theatre director, his driver, and a fire-engine-red Saab 900 Turbo—in my eyes, the film’s true star.
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Public Art at Evergreen
Toronto
2022
Designed by Laura Grier, these raised plant beds showcase four of North America’s most unique native edible plants: pawpaw, American persimmon, groundnut and wild strawberry. The elusive yet sought after pawpaw and American persimmon are known for their luxurious tropical flavours, the ground nut for its tasty tubers, while the wild strawberry provides a delightful groundcover of tiny, sweet fruits. Together, these plants speak to the potential diversity of a regenerative landscape while providing a source of nutritious food both for pollinators and people.
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Public Art at Evergreen
Toronto
2022
New York-based art collective Mare Liberum explored issues around urban watershed systems, Indigenous water relationships and the role of art in civic and environmental policy in their public engagement project In Which We Create a People’s Map of the Don River Valley. Over two years, the collective collaborated on research and investigated the relationship between Toronto’s Lower Don River, its constituents, and visioning plans for the future of the watershed with local knowledge holders. Together, they proposed different ways of engaging with the complex history of the Don: generating a “grey” paper; facilitating boat building workshops; organizing a funeral procession for the river; initiating a participatory boat launch on urban waterways; and creating podcast series.
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Public Art at Evergreen
Toronto
2022
The Sàmi artist-architect Joar Nango will map Toronto’s ravines for a new installment of his expanded television series Post-Capitalist Architecture-TV. Nango will film a roaming, site-responsive, live-streamed episode from various locations in the urban wilderness—from the Don River to Black Creek—complete with itinerant, improvisational structures built using foraged and reclaimed materials gathered from Toronto’s ravine system. The series began in 2020 when the artist toured across Norway’s north with a roving television studio in a cargo van, speaking with scholars,makers, and activists about the relationship between Indigenous cultures and space.The fifth installment “On the Ravines” follows its predecessors in its variety show-like format, inviting guests planned and impromptu into Nango’s televised world.
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YOUar
Toronto
2021
Open your wallets and spend your stimulus monies, your C(E)RB, your savings from staying infor over a year on this season’s YOUar Hot Vax Summer Collection. Featuring Hiba Ali, Kiera Boult, Bridget Moser, Lisa Smolkin and Xuan Ye, the works in this drop tussle with the labour of non-binary and women artists and their wry interactions within the global unfettered consumption and innovation that capitalism breeds.
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Performa 19 Biennial
New York
2019
For Performa 19, Chou Yu-Cheng will examine systems of capital in building, construction and real estate against the backdrop of SoHo, a former industrial neighborhood and model for artist-led gentrification. Specifically, he is interested in urban renewal and real estate development in New York City, a place that is constantly rebuilding and undergoing revitalization. In a live, public performance at the Performa 19 Hub at 18 Wooster Street—formerly the Canal Lumber Co. and current location for commercial art gallery Jeffrey Deitch—Chou imagines an interior construction site complete with scaffolding just like any New York City sidewalk. A forklift operator and manual laborers will move construction materials such as sand, bricks, bags of cement and lumber into various meaningless and absurd formations that echo the ups and downs of stock market indices and property valuation.
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Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons School of Design
New York
2019
Otherworldly: Performance, Costume and Difference examines the political work at the intersections of costume, fashion and performance produced by three artists: Machine Dazzle, Narcissister and Rammellzee.
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Performa 19 Biennial
New York
2019
For Performa 19, Huang Po-Chih generated a socially focused project, engaging with members of the Asian immigrant community in New York. Co-commissioned by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the project centered on the story of Song Yang, a Chinese immigrant sex worker who fell to her death following a police raid in Flushing, Queens in 2017. After her death, migrant and Asian sex workers across New York City mobilized to fight for their rights, resulting in a historic bill that could see New York as the first state to decriminalize sex work.
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Performa 19 Biennial
New York
2019
Lap-See Lam presents Phantom Banquet, a multi-channel installation and performance piece informed by the language and hospitality rituals observed at Chinese restaurants in Sweden, like the one her family owned for many years in Stockholm. Using narrative storytelling, virtual reality, live music, and food, the work examines the relevance of imagined and metaphorical spaces and the complexity of cultural identity within the theme of diaspora.
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Performa 19 Biennial
New York
2019
Yu Cheng-Ta explored the cultural phenomenon of “influencers” in Western social media alongside celebrity and food trends in a series of live and filmed performances that appropriate the visual and narrative language of reality television. Developed through the character of Fameme, an Asian farmer drawn to New York City to promote durian—a thorny, odorous, tropical fruit indigenous to Southeast Asia—the project depicts an outsider’s quest for fame and acceptance in American culture. Fameme’s ambition draws him to the world of social media influencers and influencer events as he attempts to utilize the latest marketing trend and media obsession for his own capitalist needs.
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Performa 19 Biennial
New York
2019
SLEEP1237 draws inspiration from Matthew Fuller’s recent book, How to Sleep: the art, biology and culture of unconsciousness. SLEEP1237 brings together reading, streaming, tea, food and beer for a night’s enquiry to the question, “How can we have an aesthetics of sleep—of sensing, experiencing, doing and perceiving—without consciousness?” Art, attending to which usually implies being alert, but which also has a long history of working with the everyday, the mundane, the bodily, and the imperceptible or intuitive is one resource here. Equally, how might we rework things that are often outside of art, such as medical processes, or brewing, so that new conditions for sleep arise?
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Performa 19 Biennial
New York
2019
The screening of Shu Lea Cheang’s short films and conversation with the artist will highlight the pieces she made early in her career while living in New York, and provide the context for her current practice and continual engagement with queer and racial politics, and with the radical and the sexually transgressive. Cheang’s assertion, “I consider sex as a political statement; sexuality is a construct, fluid gender is the norm,” serves as an impetus to consider her early work anew in our charged contemporary political moment and to consider the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and other forms of marginalization.
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Performa: Radical Broadcast
New York
2019
Named after Fashion Television (1985–2007), the legendary Canadian TV show about all things fashion, this Radical Broadcast program features five videos that remix and meld performance, art, fashion, and style from the mid-1970s to the early aughts: General Idea’s Blocking (1974); Cynthia Maughan’s The Way Underpants Really Are (1975); Bernadette Corporation’s Fashion Shows (1995–1997) and Hell Frozen Over (2000); and Ryan Trecartin’s Wayne’s World (2003).These videos share a DIY approach to self-made and styled costumes, which form punky looks and haphazard quotations of prevailing trends of the day. Wild, weird, and wacky, the garments in these films work with the preexisting fashion system, subversively playing with the intersections of capital, beauty, power, identity-formation, critique, and resistance. In these segments, fashion is performed as an art of everyday life.
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