Idea Exchange
Preston
435 King Street East, Cambridge, ON
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We had pockets. What lovely hoards I kept in them…a small sketch-book and a very large pocket-knife; beside string, nails, horse-chestnuts, lumps of sugar, bits of bread-and-butter, a pair of scissors, and many other useful objects.[1]
Bits and pieces preserved in plastic panes; foamy compound pressed through the veins of a sphere; moons made plush; selvedge edges adorning circles; a curtain, a wall, a window cut into and clung onto; mesh enclosing metal and cellophane; concrete suspended in textured fabric; stones embedded in holes; a shelf stuffed with pieces of the moon; a porous cactus brushed in silver; plaster held in nylon. In Shared Pocket, Shannon Garden-Smith and M.E. Smit-Dicks present new work, transforming Preston Gallery by physicalizing cavities, considering the gathered object, and exploring domestic materiality. Foregrounding touch, Garden-Smith’s, slow processes of making harness unproductiveness in order to imagine ways of doing/making/performing uncoupled from predetermined ends. Smit-Dicks works with reclaimed detritus and textiles, playing with texture, posture, and the often-mysterious materializations of surface and structure, image and medium, object and architecture, and this and that.
[1] Gwen Raverat quoted in Barbara Burman. “Pocketing the Difference: Gender and Pockets in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” Material Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historical Perspective, edited by Barbara Burman and Carole Turbin, Blackwell Publishing, 2003, pp. 77–99.
M.E. Smit-Dicks lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland, where she is an MFA candidate at the Glasgow School of Art. She graduated from the University of Toronto in 2011, majoring in Visual Studies and Philosophy. Smit-Dicks has exhibited her work at Tramway (Glasgow), Reid Gallery (Glasgow), 8eleven Galley (Toronto), G Gallery (Toronto), Birch Contemporary (Toronto), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (Toronto), Gallery Stratford, Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Garden-Smith and Smit-Dicks have worked together since 2009, both in and out of Toronto’s XXXX Collective, with Corrie Jackson and Polina Teif.
Shannon Garden-Smith lives and works in Toronto. She received her MFA in studio art from the University of Guelph in 2017 and her BA from the University of Toronto in 2012. She has recently exhibited at Birch Contemporary (Toronto), Erin Stump Projects (Toronto), 8-11 Gallery (Toronto), Y+ Contemporary (Scarborough), Kunstverein am-Rosa-Luxembourg-Platz (Berlin).
Garden-Smith and Smit-Dicks have worked together since 2009, both in and out of Toronto’s XXXX Collective, with Corrie Jackson and Polina Teif.
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