Sandra Brewster, our Artist Prize Winner in 2018 is having a very busy and productive year.
Her exhibition Town Girls Beneath at YYZ Artists Outlet is a compilation of videos that documents gallery technicians sanding down and painting over a wall work to make room for incoming exhibitions. The photo-based wall transfer being covered is called Town Girls Atop a Hill and depicts women posing – standing and sitting – somewhere on a hilltop in Guyana. The transfer work was part of Brewster’s 2017 thesis exhibition A Trace | Evidence of Time Past at Art Museum at the University of Toronto. For this exhibition she used metaphor, materiality and storytelling to reflect on the transition of home, using her family’s migration from Guyana to Toronto as inspiration. The wall transfer encouraged her to consider an everlasting legacy, that although the image is no longer visible it does not mean that the impact of its presence is no longer there.
Opening: Friday September 27, 6:00PM to 8:00PM
Exhibition runs: September 28, 2019 to November 30, 2019
YYZ Artists’ Outlet
140-401 Richmond St. W.
Her on-going installation series Blur appears at the Art Gallery of Ontario in gallery 238, the Mary & Harry Jackman Gallery and in Kingston’s Agnes Etherington Gallery Atrium. The series explores layered experiences of identity – ones that may bridge relationships to Canada and elsewhere, as well as to the present and the past. She is influenced by vernacular photographs, particularly images of Caribbean Canadians not long after their arrival in this country. The subjects within the frame radiate anticipation and seem to be preparing for something unknown to them at the time. The artist compares this feeling to the gel transfer process she uses to create her images: she has a general sense of what will unfold, but the end result is still uncertain. The unpredictable process evokes the complexities of global movement, such as the migration of her parents and their peers who left Guyana for Toronto in the late 1960s. The ongoing Blur series is a meditation on transitional states of diasporic presence. Inspired by the sense of memory suffusing old photographs, Brewster mimics and exaggerates the physical quality of images by revealing imperfections left by creases, tears and folds.
Exhibition runs: July 24, 2019 – March 29, 2020
Art Gallery of Ontario
317 Dundas St. W.
Finally, Sandra and Erica De Freitas (Artist Prize Winner 2018) are both appearing in a show curated by Mona Filip at the Koffler Gallery. Through critical investigations of the domestic realm, Undomesticated considers the psychological, political and emotional layers that shape our sense of home and belonging. Detouring the objects and settings of dwelling spaces, the exhibition addresses an underlying impossibility to fully adapt to or tame our environments in order to construct places where our bodies and psyches can seamlessly fit in.
Exhibition runs: September 18 – November 17, 2019
Koffler Gallery
Artscape Youngplace,
180 Shaw Street
