The Shell Projects

ummmmp - asinnajaq
In asinnajaq’s words, ummmmp is an attestation of love for Inuit come and gone and still with us. It is an acknowledgment of life, love, and loss.

asinnajaq’s practice is led by a care and generosity towards images. The work presented at *Queenspecific in Toronto’s Queen West neighborhood speaks to a sister work presented in May at The New Gallery in Calgary’s east village. In their kindred visuals, the two pieces share the desire of memorialisation critical in remembrance. The high visibility and simultaneous temporariness of both exhibition spaces are important aspects to reflect upon in relation to how they are deployed vis-a-vis the marginalized realities of the unhoused across the country and the related realities of gentrification, housing exploitation, and barely existing social infrastructures. asinnajaq’s work overlays these interlinked social realities with a politics of care characterized by the intimacy, openness, and celebration necessary to caring for community.

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asinnajaq is the daughter of Carol Rowan and Jobie Weetaluktuk. She is an urban Inuk from Inukjuak, Nunavik and lives in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). asinnajaq’s art practice spans many mediums from film to performance video, to curation and much in between. She co-created Tilliraniit, a three day festival celebrating Inuit art and artists. asinnajaq wrote and directed Three Thousand (2017) a short sci-fi documentary. She co-curated Isuma’s show in the ‘Canadian’ pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. She was long listed for the 2020 Sobey Art Award. She co-curated the inaugural exhibition INUA at the Qaumajuq. Asinnajaq’s work has been exhibited at art galleries and film festivals around the world.

This Wednesday evening, Abedar will be performing a different performance starting at 7pm. Come join us for golden hour in the alleyway if you're around!

The exhibition continues until August 28.

Speaking Across the Divide - Abedar Kamgari
August 4-28, 2022

Opening Reception: August 4, 7:00-9:00pm
Performance 1: August 6, 2:00pm
Performance 2: August 10, 7:00pm

When I was eight years old, my father wrote a play foreseeing mother and I’s imminent emigration. An immigrant father goes to visit his young child but the mother is not home, and so father and child have an exchange from either side of a locked door.

The artworks in Speaking Across the Divide are inspired by this fictional story as well as its parallels in baba and I's experiences as a father and child living with geographical, cultural, linguistic, generational, and gendered distances. I reimagine objects from the set of the play—a lone door in the foreground and a long curtain in the background—as manifestations of the context and conditions of displacement and diaspora. Through performative and material explorations, I place these symbolic objects into conversations with a range of poetic, archeological, and linguistic threads to reflect on distances both personal and global.

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Abedar Kamgari is an emerging artist, curator, and arts worker based in Hamilton and Toronto. In her art practice, Abedar considers the contexts and conditions of displacement and diaspora using site-responsive, performative, and relational approaches. Her current projects explore diasporic archives, familial inheritances, and the idea of distance, inspired by a play written by her father and garments passed down from her grandmothers. Abedar received a BFA in Studio Art from McMaster University in 2016 and has performed, screened, and exhibited in a range of institutional contexts since. She is completing an MFA at OCAD University.

In asinnajaq’s words, ummmmp is an attestation of love for Inuit come and gone and still with us. It is an acknowledgment of life, love, and loss.

asinnajaq’s practice is led by a care and generosity towards images. The work presented at TNG in Calgary’s east village speaks to a sister work presented simultaneously in the window space of *Queenspecific in Toronto’s Queen West neighborhood. In their kindred visuals, the two pieces share the desire of memorialisation critical in remembrance. The high visibility and simultaneous temporariness of both exhibition spaces are important aspects to reflect upon in relation to how they are deployed vis-a-vis the marginalized realities of the unhoused across the country and the related realities of gentrification, housing exploitation, and barely existing social infrastructures. asinnajaq’s work overlays these interlinked social realities with a politics of care characterized by the intimacy, openness, and celebration necessary to caring for community.

—

asinnajaq is the daughter of Carol Rowan and Jobie Weetaluktuk. She is an urban Inuk from Inukjuak, Nunavik and lives in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). asinnajaq’s art practice spans many mediums from film to performance video, to curation and much in between. She co-created Tilliraniit, a three day festival celebrating Inuit art and artists. asinnajaq wrote and directed Three Thousand (2017) a short sci-fi documentary. She co-curated Isuma’s show in the ‘Canadian’ pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. She was long listed for the 2020 Sobey Art Award. She co-curated the inaugural exhibition INUA at the Qaumajuq. Asinnajaq’s work has been exhibited at art galleries and film festivals around the world.

The New Gallery is pleased to present “ummmp” by asinnajaq, curated by The Shell Projects on our Billboard 208 space.

In asinnajaq’s words, ummmmp is an attestation of love for Inuit come and gone and still with us. It is an acknowledgment of life, love, and loss.

asinnajaq’s practice is led by a care and generosity towards images. The work presented at TNG in Calgary’s east village speaks to a sister work presented simultaneously in the window space of *Queenspecific in Toronto’s Queen West neighborhood. In their kindred visuals, the two pieces share the desire of memorialisation critical in remembrance. The high visibility and simultaneous temporariness of both exhibition spaces are important aspects to reflect upon in relation to how they are deployed vis-a-vis the marginalized realities of the unhoused across the country and the related realities of gentrification, housing exploitation, and barely existing social infrastructures. asinnajaq’s work overlays these interlinked social realities with a politics of care characterized by the intimacy, openness, and celebration necessary to caring for community.

This exhibition is on view at Billboard 208, a programming site situated on the exterior storefront of TNG. To read more about the project, please head to the link in our bio!⁠

Procession by Alix Pearlstein

*QueenSpecific
787 Queen Street West

November 8 - January 8, 2022

the shell projects is excited to finally present Procession a window exhibition by Alix Pearlstein at *QueenSpecifc.

We first had the pleasure of encountering Pearlstein’s work at the ASHES/ASHES space in New York City in February 2019. INTERIORS championed the interdisciplinary and temporal span of Pearlstein’s work with small collages and video works on monitors, all within a highly stylized 1970s pop interior. Many months– and then years–followed, and we kept thinking about that show and about Pearlstein’s practice.

Then, early in the pandemic, we decided to reach out and encountered the artist’s tremendous generosity in thinking through which of the many distinct and all still terribly relevant projects throughout the course of her career would best suit a long window that required vinyl presentation in the winter.

Procession is nothing like what we saw in that first viewing of Pearlstein’s work, but in its haunting and insistent presence, it’s exactly like that exhibition too. At *QS “Procession" is a still from a short video of the same name from 2012. It is part of a group of works that we’d encourage you to seek out! Each of the works utilizes a lite-panel as a prop: here, it tethers a group of actors, illuminating their faces and white shirts as they move through an otherwise dark space, suggesting either a drowning out of light from the space or its absorption by the panel: an apt metaphor if there ever was one for the cold dark times of the winter solstice.

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Alix Pearlstein's work in video, performance, installation and sculpture has been widely exhibited internationally. Selected solo exhibitions include ASHES/ASHES, NYC, UK Art Museum, Lexington KY; Upfor Gallery, Portland OR; On Stellar Rays, NYC; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; Ballroom Marfa, Texas; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; CAM, St. Louis; The Kitchen, NYC and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge MA. Performances have been seen at Aspen Art Museum, Art Basel, Miami and The Park Avenue Armory, NYC.

A Passage - Pejvak

Shell - 13 Mansfield Ave (back alley)
Nov 3 - Dec 3, 2021

shell is thrilled to announce its final exhibition of the year featuring the work of Pejvak!

A Passage (2018) is a two channel work that depicts Agarak’s theatre with the local children’s choir announcing the major embarkation points on the former Yerevan-Baku railroad on one screen, as horsemen travel through the now-defunct rail tunnel on the other. The work explores the state of the Armenian southern border in the midst of the construction of an industrial Free Economic Zone and simultaneous abandonment and destruction of a historical trans-national railway. A Passage addresses the multiple historical, financial, and socio-political pressures that the land has and continues to be subject to in the service of capital in Armenia, as well as both Russia and Iran, and across Asia more broadly.

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Pejvak (PJVK) is the long-term collaboration between Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari. Through their multivalent, intuitive approach to research and living they find themselves in a convergence and entanglement with likeminded collaborators, histories and various geographies.

Rouzbeh Akhbari is an artist working in video installation and film. His practice is research-driven and usually exists at the intersections of political economy, critical architecture and planning. Through a delicate examination of the violences and intimacies that occur at the boundaries of lived experience and constructed histories, Akhbari uncovers the minutiae of power that organizes and regiments the world around us.

Felix Kalmenson is an artist whose practice navigates installation, video and performance. Kalmenson’s work variably narrates the liminal space of a researcher’s and artist’s encounter with landscape and archive. By bearing witness to everyday life, and hardening the more fragile vestiges of private and collective histories through their work, Kalmenson gives themselves away to the cadence of a poem, always in flux.

untitled
by Andrew Harding

*QueenSpecific
787 Queen Street West
August 6 - September 6, 2021

the shell projects is so pleased to present untitled a window exhibition by Andrew Harding at *QueenSpecifc.

We spent the long winter of distance talking with Andrew over Zoom about what he’d like to show in the window. Harding was in the middle of working on a number of new projects, but continued to gravitate towards an earlier wire motive that he had not yet resolved. As spring slowly–and then very quickly–moved into all our lives, the barbed wire came into focus as a clear, direct and effective image for the window.

In the artists’ own words: “Unconsciously, I found myself using symbols and objects that all represent a barrier of sorts, ones that trap and submerge and surround and obscure. Barriers that are both visible and invisible.” Indeed, the barbed wire, as pattern, texture, symbol, is ubiquitous in the daytime. It does not recede or advance, but affirms itself on the Queen West strip, part of the quotidian in the most mundane and terrifying ways. In the night time, it expands. Bouncing into the street, multiplying by projecting shadows on the walls surrounding it, it glows in the dark.

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Andrew Harding is a Métis artist based in Toronto/Tkaronto. Creating hybrid sculptures he is focused on making curious installations from found and fabricated objects. Andrew is a current MFA candidate in the Visual Arts program at York University.

A Vague Memory
by Véronique Sunatori

*QueenSpecific
787 Queen Street West
June 14 - July 23, 2021

the shell projects is really happy to present A Vague Memory, a window exhibition by Véronique Sunatori at *QueenSpecifc.

We remember seeing Véro’s work in 2018 at the terrific exhibition Forward Motion at the Small Arms Building in Mississauga like it was yesterday. Looking down at her attentively arranged sculptures, thinking about how the delicacy with which Sunatori works echoes the fragility of the details on the natural world that she depicts, we knew that her practice had tremendous potential for our little Queen Street window. Working together since 2019, we’ve taken our time supporting a work that’s been central to the artists’ developing practice.

The composition at *Queenspecific consists of 360 ceramic tiles that make up miniature vignettes of various natural landscapes Sunatori has visited in the recent past. As the landscapes from Toronto, Niagara, Osaka, Gaspésie, and Gatineau intertwine with each other, signs and symbols appear sparingly, hinting to the natural elements found in those places. As the city settles into another concrete summer, we spend hot sunny days meandering through alleyways, parks and smelling the neighborhood flowers. Stuck in the metropolis, Sunatori’s work brings us out into where we’d like to be, places we’ve been, and places we may someday go.

Véronique Sunatori is a multidisciplinary visual artist living and working in Toronto, Canada. Sunatori has participated in residencies at AIRY Yamanashi (Japan) and the Société d’art et d’histoire de Beauport (Québec). She is the recipient of a Research and Creation grant for emerging artists from the Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Québec and an Individual Visual Artist grant from the Toronto Art Council. Sunatori’s work has been presented at Art Mûr, FOFA Gallery, Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), Small Arms Inspection Building, CIRCA Art Actuel, TAP Montreal and Durham Art Gallery. With her artist collective XVK, the group has performed and exhibited at the BIG on Bloor Festival, Y+ Contemporary, Martin Goya Business, Idea Exchange, Long Winter and at Flux Factory in NYC. Sunatori holds an MFA in Visual Art from York University (2018).

HELLO HI

Listen to the Sounds of an 18,000-year-old Conch The noises of a massive conch shell from the Upper Paleolithic Marsoulas cave society were reproduced and published online.

Fire
by Srijon Chowdhury

*QueenSpecific
787 Queen Street West
March 22 - April 30, 2021

the shell projects is excited to present Fire, a window exhibition by Srijon Chowdhury at *QueenSpecifc.

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We’ve been following Chowdhury’s work for many years–in person, starting at his exhibition at Roberta Pelan in 2017 and through to his presence at Art Toronto and digitally, by admiring his curatorial project Chicken Coop Contemporary in Portland, OR.

Fire is an image made from parts of Chowdhury's Revelation Theater inspired by the Book of Revelation. The momentous works came at a time where Chowdhury sought to explore how to have hope in times of cataclysmic change. This investigation and thematic is obviously relevant now as Toronto hits it’s one year anniversary of pandemic life. Yet, the ominous imagery of Fire is also somehow a relief, a moment of respite from the work of moving towards a future. It is a rich, totalising landscape that in this troubled present allows us to momentarily be.

Our vinyl exhibitions are a way to sustainably finance the presentation of international artists’ work.

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Srijon Chowdhury (Dhaka, Bangladesh, 1987) lives and works in Portland, OR. He holds a BFA from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, MN, and an MFA from the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA.

An Ear Against the Wall
by Parker Kay

*QueenSpecific
787 Queen Street West
December 14 - January 29, 2021

Working with Parker Kay is always a tremendous pleasure and the shell projects is happy to present An Ear Against the Wall, a window exhibition at *QueenSpecifc.

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Begun in 2016, An Ear Against the Wall is an ongoing act of documenting the demolition of a neighbourhood parking garage and the subsequent (re)development of the area. Kay revisits the site, wandering along the outskirts of temporary fences, the brush of a tree-lined clearing, the footsteps in the snow, on hot summer days, in a tepid rainshower and at dusk in autumn, discerning the meandering emotional geographies that appear briefly only to disappear again as construction continues. As Kay states, “the drift is a form of protest.” The titles in the video are an integral part of this project. A facet of Kay’s writing practice, they materialize how the artist’s durational engagement with space evolves lines of thought.

Growth emerges: in the distance, with cranes looming on the horizon as buildings rise over time, and in the foreground, as residents create paths across the field and resist others. Although figures are largely absent in the video, their presence is constantly felt: as if telling us something of the way the city is pushing them out, abstracting people in the name of progress. Indeed, “progress” is a term that Kay questions both in this video and in praxis. Throughout his work, he actively pays tribute to the buildings that remain, to the concrete lines that run through our city, and to the provisional walking paths built through sheer defiance as the city erases these various parts to make space for the new.

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Parker Kay is a multidisciplinary artist and writer currently working in Toronto. Kay’s practice implements experiential research and qualitative mapping to explore how place-making permeates our lives and marks our landscapes. As an avid urban explorer, Kay has led walking and cycling tours with the Jane’s Walk Festival and the Ontario Association of Architects (OAA); he also has worked on projects with Myseum of Toronto and the Vancouver Biennale. Kay’s writing has been published in C Magazine, SITE, Cornelia, Peripheral Review; and he has exhibited at Modern Fuel (2020), Sibling (2019), Motel Brooklyn (2017), The Toronto Reference Library (2017), and TOWARDS (2016). In 2019 Kay founded Pumice Raft, a project space in Toronto’s west end, to explore more curatorial projects.

Kay is currently a researcher and collections manager at The Archive of Modern Conflict and on the board of directors at Art Metropole.