REOPENING: New Strata: Five Years
Misbah Ahmed, Shannon Garden-Smith, Andrew Harding, Cadence Planthara
Curated by Hearth
April 27 - June 8, 2024
Opening: Saturday, April 27, 7-10PM
NEW LOCATION:
1267A St. Clair Avenue West, Unit 6
Toronto, ON
New Strata: Five Years re-visits the practices of four artists featured in our inaugural 2019 exhibition. As we launch a new permanent space, it only felt right to gather with Misbah Ahmed, Shannon Garden-Smith, Andrew Harding, and Cadence Planthara five years after our initial collaboration. In returning to this theme, we return to stratification’s relationship with time. We enter a recursive process of reflection: a spiral that deviates from itself each time it circles back. We hope you can join us April 27, 7-10PM for another experiment in housewarming.
Here’s a place to pay respect to your lifestyle and the way you show it off. A film is forming giving you everything. That's what we have to gain. The author cannot be known enough. We have our fluster of files, piles, haircuts and leftovers. We also have the formalized methods of representing this time-stacking cosmos, our diaries. So, Misbah knocked the arms off the big pot from last time to fit it into the kiln. Otherwise it couldn’t get fired. The other one’s a bit skinnier so it fit just fine. We put it up on a shelf so you can get a closer look at the cats. There's also a fresh print on the opposing wall. Woven stone sounds like the name of your favourite guitar music band back in highschool. You totally forgot about them until you charged up your old mp3 player for the first time in 5, 10, 15 years. Shannon’s woven stone is strung up from the rafters in a different pattern than ever before. This tapestry(?) is really grungy and would make perfect cover art. We’re pet sitting for Andrew for a couple months. He says he’s busy letting materials say what they want to do when they get together, which has led him all over town! He’s learning from other folks who have taken a lot of care attuning to what these forces can afford. Play requires a great deal of trust, now he has this baby critter to take care of. It gets cold here so the little guy needed a snowsuit. Cadence just came back from the moon (Alberta) and all she got was tortoise spun grace. You can always tell what day of the week it is by looking at the colour of the shirt she's wearing. We love the colours of these hollow reptiles. What do the numbers mean? Is it a pattern? Or the simple fact of difference? We used to like the mirthless codes of representation because it helped us establish correspondence. Now we’re comfortable admitting it's mainly posture, twin-speak, butter fingers, and laughter that gets us in the pocket. And that sweet spot has a hole in it. The embrace. The last quarrel. The stretch euphoria. The moving being without identity. Larval in the language commons, maybe something will unfold in a year or two: let's wait and see. This is not a discussion of means nor ends. We’re talking about the little suspensions we carry with us. All these things. They move where something is nothing, that is, in the heart.
