Presence in a past or an undetermined future. features the work of artists Nabil Azab and Shannon Garden-Smith, in an exhibition 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 artists’ immersive works, viewers are encouraged to engage in an act of prolonged looking, and move toward a space of affect. It is in this space, and in the coalescing of past and future, that the present moment emerges.

Presented by Onsite Gallery; Exhibition selected as the inaugural the Delaney Family Emerging Curator's Prize (OCADU/Onsite Gallery).

Curated by Avalon Mott

• Nabil Azab (b. 1994, Paris, France) is a multidisciplinary artist of North African descent. They live and work in kanien’kehá:ka territory (Montréal). Azab employs drawing, painting, writing and researching as fodder for abstract photographic works that resist the objectivity and disciplinarity of the medium in contemporary life. Recent solo exhibitions include Something good that never happened at Afternoon Projects, Vancouver (2022) and the welling up which would not pass at DRAC, Drummondville, Quebec (2022).

   

• Shannon Garden-Smith (she/her) is an artist of Scottish-Irish settler heritage based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. 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, intervening into capitalist, productivist modes of telling time and of relation. Garden-Smith is a doctoral student in visual art at York University.

• Avalon Mott (b. 1990) is a curator, photographer, and arts administrator originally from Vancouver, now calling Tkaronto/Toronto home. She holds a BFA in photography from Emily Carr University, and an MFA in Criticism + Curatorial Practice from OCAD University as the recipient of the Presidential Scholarship and Ontario Graduate Scholarship. Mott was a founding member and co-director of FIELD Contemporary (Vancouver), and has curated for numerous galleries and festivals in British Columbia and Ontario. Alongside her current position as Director at Xpace Cultural Centre (Toronto), she is a contributing member of the plumb (Toronto). Her curatorial practice engages the curatorial methodology of exhibitionary affect and how, when applied, can heighten moments of feeling in the gallery space through individual relational experiences of the works on display.