All photos by Polina Teif.
Presence in a past or an undetermined future. is a two-person exhibition featuring Nabil Azab and Shannon Garden-Smith that endeavours to hold a moment of presence by calling on what came before it, and giving space to think of what will come after it. Through the immersive work of these artists, viewers are encouraged to engage in an act of prolonged looking and moved towards a space of affect. It is in this space and the coalescing of history and future, that the present moment emerges.
Xpace Cultural Centre
Onsite Gallery, 199 Richmond St., Toronto ON.
January 22 - May 17, 2025
Wednesday 12pm - 7pm, Thursday - Saturday, 1pm - 5pm
Opening reception Wednesday January 22 5:30pm - 8pm
Exhibition Essay - https://www.ocadu.ca/sites/default/files/2025-01/PP_booklet_dig_fin.pdf
Nabil Azab (b.1994, Paris, Fr) is a multidisciplinary artist of North African descent. Nabil employs drawing, painting, writing, and researching as a starting point for abstract photographic works that resist the objectivity and disciplinarily of the medium in contemporary life. Often using public, private, and family archives, the softened contours of Nabil’s work become a host for the affective frequencies of their origin. Nabil is currently an MFA candidate at The University Of California - Riverside and is located in Los Angeles, California.
.
Shannon Garden-Smith (she/her) is an artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada, of Scottish and Irish settler heritage. Working across sculpture, installation, and expanded photo practice, Garden-Smith examines the material-social impact of the surfaces that clad our contemporary built world. Through a slow, repetitive process that re-visibilizes how the day-to-day architectures of our lives become naturalized through repeated exposure, her work re-sensitizes us to the labour and material that sustain our everyday. Engendering slippages between surface and structure, her work examines labour, identity, and power in human-built architectures, seeking to intervene into capitalist, productivist modes of telling time and modes of relation. Garden-Smith is a doctoral student in visual art at York University.
Images by Alison Postma.
