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Reflections on Transparency
Benjamin de Boer and Sophia Oppel
TPW is delighted to present a new commission by Benjamin de Boer and Sophia Oppel.
Reflections on Transparency is an examination of the transparent barriers that have become ubiquitous in sites of retail in light of COVID-19. Born of an interest in hostile architecture, public space and landscapes that elicit particular behaviours, this investigation meditates on the intersections between the politics of hygiene and disaster capitalism.
Benjamin and Sophia’s project will be posted on TPW’s Instagram from October 8 – 10, 2020.
Biographies
Benjamin de Boer (b. 1995, Attawandaron, ON) is a writer, researcher, and bookseller living in Tkaronto. They received their Honours BA in Philosophy and Archaeology from the University of Toronto in 2018. Benjamin can be found studying the melancholy poetics of our earth lyric and exploring their openness to improvisation within a practice of group enunciation. Favouring sympedagogic situations, Benjamin currently co-directs Hearth, an arts space founded alongside Rowan Lynch, Sameen Mahboubi, and Philip Leonard Ocampo.
Sophia Oppel (b. 1995) is an arts practitioner and researcher born and based in Tkaronto. Oppel’s work examines interfaces and infrastructures as sites of power, and their influences on embodied experience. Oppel received her BFA from OCAD University and is currently a co-director of Bunker 2 Gallery, and a Master of Visual Studies candidate at the University of Toronto. Oppel has exhibited locally and internationally.
Reflections on Transparency is presented in the context of MOVEMENTS. As its title suggests, this online and site-specific program presents several projects by artists whose work references diverse definitions, experiences and enactments of movements. Bringing together a range of practices, MOVEMENTS reflects on both the intimate scale of the body as it shifts through time and space, within transient gestures and encounters, and organized actions that provoke vital, unsettling change.
MOVEMENTS is made possible with support from Partners in Art
Image Credit
Photographs from Benjamin de Boer and Sophia Oppel
Reflections on Transparency
Benjamin de Boer and Sophia Oppel
TPW is delighted to present a new commission by Benjamin de Boer and Sophia Oppel.
Reflections on Transparency is an examination of the transparent barriers that have become ubiquitous in sites of retail in light of COVID-19. Born of an interest in hostile architecture, public space and landscapes that elicit particular behaviours, this investigation meditates on the intersections between the politics of hygiene and disaster capitalism.
Benjamin and Sophia’s project will be posted on TPW’s Instagram from October 8 – 10, 2020.
Biographies
Benjamin de Boer (b. 1995, Attawandaron, ON) is a writer, researcher, and bookseller living in Tkaronto. They received their Honours BA in Philosophy and Archaeology from the University of Toronto in 2018. Benjamin can be found studying the melancholy poetics of our earth lyric and exploring their openness to improvisation within a practice of group enunciation. Favouring sympedagogic situations, Benjamin currently co-directs Hearth, an arts space founded alongside Rowan Lynch, Sameen Mahboubi, and Philip Leonard Ocampo.
Sophia Oppel (b. 1995) is an arts practitioner and researcher born and based in Tkaronto. Oppel’s work examines interfaces and infrastructures as sites of power, and their influences on embodied experience. Oppel received her BFA from OCAD University and is currently a co-director of Bunker 2 Gallery, and a Master of Visual Studies candidate at the University of Toronto. Oppel has exhibited locally and internationally.
Reflections on Transparency is presented in the context of MOVEMENTS. As its title suggests, this online and site-specific program presents several projects by artists whose work references diverse definitions, experiences and enactments of movements. Bringing together a range of practices, MOVEMENTS reflects on both the intimate scale of the body as it shifts through time and space, within transient gestures and encounters, and organized actions that provoke vital, unsettling change.
MOVEMENTS is made possible with support from Partners in Art
Image Credit
Photographs from Benjamin de Boer and Sophia Oppel
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Shannon Gaden-Smith, Upright is fine, but downright is where I am (detail), accordion-fold book containing 30 double-sided archival prints; bound in a flocked clamshell box, 9" x 12", 2021, Edition of 7 © 2021 Shannon Garden-Smith
Upright is fine, but downright is where I am
Shannon Garden-Smith
Gallery TPW is pleased to present the launch of Shannon Garden-Smith’s new limited edition book, Upright is fine, but downright is where I am. The artist’s book continues her ongoing project documenting shoe treads printed in sidewalk concrete and road paint. Bound in a flocked clamshell box, the book is structured as an accordion fold-out that holds 30 double-sided prints, or 60 unique images. For each image that is immediately visible within the book, a second image remains latent on its reverse. However—tucked into slits on each accordion-fold page—the double sided prints are designed to be removed from the book structure, inviting countless re-arrangements.
Imaging traces of touch that result from movement through the city, Garden-Smith’s photo series refocuses the way we look at the cities’ most pedestrian concrete surfaces, which are comprised primarily of sand. The project lingers on sand—a material we connect deeply with time and the infinite—just as we find ourselves inconceivably but demonstrably on the brink of exhausting this resource.
The artist would like to thank Kate Murdoch for creating the flocked clamshell boxes and Dimitri Levanoff at Imagefoundry for printing the publication.
Books are $700 each. For full details on how to purchase one, please send an email to: info @ gallerytpw.ca.
Programming
In Conversation: Shannon Garden-Smith and Stephanie Springgay
Thursday, June 17, 6pm
Online Zoom Webinar
Join us for a conversation between artist Shannon Garden-Smith and scholar Stephanie Springgay, who will discuss their respective practices centred around walking. As part of an ongoing series, this event coincides with the release of Garden-Smith’s new limited edition book, Upright is fine, but downright is where I am. This project is a continuation of the artist’s photograph and video work, The Hourglass, which is part of Gallery TPW’s 2020 project MOVEMENTS. For more information and to register, please visit the event page, here.
Biographies
Shannon Garden-Smith (she/her) is an artist living and working between Tkaronto/Toronto and Stratford, Canada. She completed an MFA at the University of Guelph (‘17) and a BA at the University of Toronto (‘12). Working primarily in sculpture and installation, Garden-Smith’s recent projects focus on the surfaces within and on which contemporary life unfolds, training a sensitivity to the ground beneath us. Through a slow, repetitive process that re-visibilizes how the day-to-day architectures of our lives become invisibilized/naturalized through repeated exposure, Garden-Smith practices in an exuberant material poetics of lack and excess.
Garden-Smith has recently shown work with The Plumb (Toronto), Christie Contemporary (Toronto), Pumice Raft (Toronto), Modern Fuel (Kingston ON), TIER: The Institute for Endotic Research (Berlin), YYZ Artists’ Outlet (Toronto), Birch Contemporary (Toronto), Erin Stump Projects (Toronto), and 8-11 Gallery (Toronto). She and artist Amanda Boulos will present a project at The Bows (Mohkinstsis/Calgary AB) in the upcoming year.
Stephanie Springgay is Director of the School of the Arts and Associate Professor at McMaster University. She is a leading scholar of research-creation with a focus on walking, affect, queer theory, and contemporary art as pedagogy. She directs the SSHRC-funded research-creation project The Pedagogical Impulse which explores the intersections between contemporary art and pedagogy. With Dr. Sarah Truman she co-directs WalkingLab – an international network of artists and scholars committed to critical approaches to walking methods. Additionally, she is a stream lead on a SSHRC partnership grant Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life. Other curatorial projects include The Artist’s Soup Kitchen – a 6 week performance project that explore food soveriegnty, queer feminist solidarity, and the communal act of cooking and eating together. She has published widely on contemporary art, curriculum studies, and qualitative research methodologies.