The Record of the Place

Departures, Arrivals & Two Workshops in Toronto this October

This is the time, and this is the record of the time.

10:08AM Eastern Standard Time, 03 October, 2024. Morning chill, mountain lake. Day emulsifies into milky fog racing slow against the glass surface. Try to hear it pass, try to hear it being passed. There is a note. It rings to mark the time. Its echo losses itself. It records a movement in and through, never out.

This is the place, and this is the record of the place.

Wooden chair. MDF tabletop on steel legs. Wooden deck with wrought iron rails. Birch, Poplar, Spruce. Lake. Lac Reardon. Echo of bird’s call off the flamboyant canopy. Catham-Brownsburg. Trees I waited for, patiently. The highway’s distant roar. Québec. A Couche-Tard 5km down the road. Chemin pronounced kem-in by disembodied cellular voice. Anishinabeg land that remains unceded. Where does the fog go when it lifts?

I am offering 2 different workshops in Toronto this month —

a landscape hosts something with the Toronto Biennial of Arts @ Toronto Sculpture Garden (115 King Street East) — Sunday, 06 October, 2024 — 3-6PM RSVP for free

I first conceived of this workshop after coming across the artists’ book Grey Cobalt by Felicia Honkasalo at the MoMA library in May, in which the artist arranges a Finnish landscape in image and archive. The book contains another, smaller book sewn into the back cover — Descriptions of Invisible Objects by Ada Smailbegovic.

Within this text, she writes:

“She appears almost entirely outside of narrative, as if standing outside of the river she enters it only transiently making a slight invisible movement inside of it.

A landscape hosts something.

She does not see through the geometrical optics of reflection.
Brittle stars don't have eyes; they are eyes, she thinks.

What if your whole body were able to see.”

Descriptions is as much a response to Honkasalo’s visual arrangement as a landscape drifting between time and place, text and image, visible and opaque.

I designed a landscape hosts something for artists and writers to experiment with place, ecology, and environment. The act of landscape representation holds as many meanings as there have been cultures on this planet. We’re most familiar with those that stem from capitalism and colonialism, since this is the context most of us live in. But landscape can and has been represented differently — and that’s exactly what this workshop seeks to do: revalorize landscape as a site for critical artistic practice, thereby creating new places and contexts for us to live and create within.

The workshop I’ve designed for the Toronto Biennial is situated around a sculpture by Rajni Perera called Vimina (N1 Starfighter) that combines popular science fiction and Sri Lankan craft as a metaphor for off-worlding and immigrant resilience. The activities will get participants to play with the actions of moving and migrating — verbs that reference many kinds of passage — while prompting participants to understand how their creative practices make, unmake, and remake landscape.

Those who join will get a free copy of a pamphlet and postcard I designed specifically for this workshop. Here’s a sneak peek of the pamphlet, printed in riso green and bubblegum pink at Vide Press in Toronto ; )

Chromocore with SHEEEP school @ Back Alley for Art & Architecture (300 Campbell Ave, Unit 114, Toronto) — Sunday, 20 October, 2024 — 1-5PM — PWYC $50-80, materials included!

Chromocore is a new workshop I’ve developed with the help of SHEEEP School, an experimental and creative learning space based in BAAA! (Back Alley for Art + Architecture) and tied to SHEEEP Studio.

Chromocore is a reference to the chemical, political, and emotional dimensions of working with colour. Chormo comes from the Ancient Greek chroma (‘color’) and core from the Latin cor (‘heart’).

This workshop focuses on two kinds of textile dyeing: shibori and batch dyeing. We’ll use bleach to subtract pigment from a cotton textile using shibori resists with found objects from the local environment, and then add more pigment in small baths of fibre reactive dyes. This multi-part dyeing process is one I’ve developed over the past few years experimenting with patterns to getting colour off and on fibre — one that yields surprising patterns and chance results.

I’ll share my process with participants so that they’ll leave with both a bandana-sized example piece and the steps to replicate the process at home, or wherever dyeing occurs. Since we’ll be using synthetic chemicals like bleach and procion dyes, which are better left off the body and out of the watershed, we’ll also go over how to safely use and dispose of toxic substances. The environmental lens will also apply to dyeing process itself, as we’ll forage for material in the alleys and roads adjacent to the workshop studio to create one of a kind resist patterns in an adaptive contemporary approach to the traditional Japanese practice of shibori.

Designing a textile workshop with a grassroots architecture studio happens to align perfectly with my experience in urban geography, visual art, and poetics — and I can’t wait to share this new learning experience with those of you who join : )

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Life is made up of repeated departures and arrivals — and October 2024 marks yet another round for me, as I prepare to depart Toronto with no set plan to return. It’s been a challenging and beautiful 6 years off and on in the city. Toronto will always be home — where I discovered this version of myself, where I found my path, where I learned to become — and I know I’ll be back eventually. The Great Lakes region will always be the most familiar landscape to me, one that I’ll hold close as I pass through others on my way. It’ll be wonderful to say hello and goodbye (for now, again) at either or both of these workshops this month. Please reach out if you’re in the city and you’d like to connect before the end of October!

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