Extended Spaces
- Transit Shelters on Queen St W
Toronto based artist Tania Kitchell documents the
passing of time and seasons in a world created
through technological invention. Images of distant
highways, captured on the Internet, are displayed
in four transit shelters on Queen Street West from
Ossington Avenue to Gladstone Avenue. Each
image is documents the time, air temperature, road
temperature and road condition. With no reference
to specific location, the images are both strange
and hauntingly familiar; as if one has already been
to this unknown place on the other side of the
world.
In Kitchell’s earlier work, she presented us with
her environment as the subject; one in which she
reacted to and interacted with. The resulting
photographs were at once documentary and
performance based. Though the acts within the
photographs were staged, the weather could not
be controlled. Recording the weather is one way in
which the artist attempts to regain this control. As
a way of documenting the passing of time as well
as an affirmation to consider each day, Kitchell
creates a sense that nothing is constant and that
change is inevitable.
Kitchell, who is of Chinese-Ukrainian descent, was
born in Saskatchewan, studied art in
Paris at Parsons School of Design and now lives in
Toronto. Solo exhibitions include Low Pressure,
James Harris Gallery (2005),
White Water, Galerie Grita Insam, Vienna (2002),
and Cold Cuts, Southern
Alberta Art Gallery (2002). Recent group
exhibitions include It’s a Big
White World, Mercer Union (2005),19 Rainstorms,
Western Bridge, Seattle
(2005), and The Weather/le temps qu’il fait, Galerie
Liane et Danny Taran,
Charles H. Scott Gallery, Blackwood Gallery (2004).









