Within Dimensions of Toronto: Looking Otherwise with Nature, many of the pieces are ephemeral in a sense, especially pointed to through their translucency. There is a unity of mid-being broken by the instances of opaque metal. Oscillating visually on the border of being solid, made seperate by glass, floating: this is possibility. This is a foreign yet familiar world, making the viewer a visitor in their own habitual “Toronto-space”, here made alien, made soft and precarious. Ephemera can be a counterpart to the literal and figurative concrete.

Abby Kettner’s latex casts, as part of her series City Skins (2023-ongoing), respond to the symbols made manifest in Toronto’s infrastructure by isolating and manipulating them. In this process, she spotlights the sense of collective commonspace defined by our collective knowledge of inhabiting this space.. This transcends barriers of class that can influence the way the city is experienced. This relationship could be a potent basis for dialogue. City infrastructure, as illustrated in Kettner’s work, can be an extension of self. To make these casts, Kettner must wait for the latex to cure, solidifying memory and experience, forming part of her own unique body  of knowledge. City infrastructure also contributes to  the construction of selfhood in its formation of a corpus of routes known, places visited, and manholes forgotten.

Culture can be construed as the ephemera of being, and the material expressions of these attributes. Manifestations of culture - formal, as well as experiential - are interventions in the normative cityspace. Formal disruption of the regular rectangularity of the city is a portal, troubling the forms of Toronto and spawning multiverses. 

Liz DeCoste’s Transfiguration II (flagging) (2023), depicts nature’s intervention in the queer navigation of the city and queer places. The vocabulary of nature is used as symbols: carnation, pansy and lavender have links to historical queer secret languages for finding each other. 

Iris Adrienne Langlois’s Shrine to Salacin (2022) speaks to the power of nature-as-symbol. Langlois describes tulips as gifts, as sensual, as encircling and cyclical. Tulips can be folded into the canon of counter-normative symbolism, breaking up the monotony of houses with bursts of colour and the promise of spring. In the same spurt of growth, they break up rectangular order with sensual forms. Using Toronto’s concrete body and its particularities as symbols, culture can enhance its potency by following nature’s interventionary lead and by speaking truth to the symbolism expressed by certain manners of infrastructure. 

Artists

Carrier Bag Collective was formed in 2022 as a group of other recent OCADU alumni that engages with collection practices as a material approach to art-making. Emphasizing community engaged practice, collective making, and collaboration, Carrier Bag strives for increased accessibility to art knowledge through workshops, skill shares and opportunities for emerging artists in the GTA.

Iris Adrienne Langlois is an multi-media artist exploring concepts of magic, nature, collection methodologies, and the sapphic experience.  She currently resides in Toronto, Ontario, where she finds joy in the magic of urban ecology.

Liz DeCoste is a queer artist with a BFA in cross-disciplinary arts and a minor in printmaking from OCADU (2022). Their work explores ways of knowing that surround human-nature relationships through the collection of natural materials. Their work draws from queer theory and eco politics to draw links between systems of knowledge and resulting oppressions.

Abby Kettner (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and aspiring arts-administrator based inToronto. Abby recently graduated with a BFA in Cross-Disciplinary Art: Life Studies from OCAD University, and her artistic practice continues to evolve as she explores Object- Oriented Ontologies through her unique visual language.

Curator

Mason Smart is an OCAD student and emerging curator and critic. He is currently working on a BA in Visual and Critical Studies. He has a deep interest in how connection and communication across biotic and abiotic spheres can be facilitated through art.