Presented across three sites in Toronto—at CONTACT Gallery, on billboards, and in an outdoor installation at Harbourfront Centre—the newly commissioned work of artist Maggie Groat implements a collage-based approach in installation, sculpture, and image. Groat’s work weaves together found and salvaged materials, layering, fragmenting, obscuring, and recombining, to hold up a distorted mirror to lived and speculative encounters with the natural world. Her practice investigates decolonial ways of being, alternative archiving, sustainable exhibition making, and the transformative potential of salvaged materials during times of living through climate emergencies. Read more here.

Curated by Tara Smith

• Maggie Groat is a visual artist who makes images and objects from found and salvaged materials. Groat’s recent projects, including STSTS (Western Front, Vancouver), Deep time, portals, particles & pulls (Armory Street, Toronto), flowers also gardens, gardens also seeds (AKA, Saskatoon) and The Future is Dark...I think (La Datcha, Project Space Festival, Berlin), engage with outdoor space through considering researched based, deep time approaches to working site-specifically. Her work has been included in several group exhibitions including LIVING ENTITIES as part of the Momenta Biennale de l’image, Illusion of Process at the Art Gallery of York University and the travelling exhibition Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts. In 2015 and 2018 her work was recognized on the Sobey Award long-list and in 2018 her exhibition suns also seasons at Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery received the OAAG award for Exhibition of the Year. She is the editor of two artists’ anthologies, The Lake (Art Metropole, 2014) and ALMANAC (KWAG, 2017) and has taught at Emily Carr University, Algoma University, and the University of Toronto. She lives and works in the Niagara region of Ontario, the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, Chonnonton, and Anishinaabeg.