Somewhere between here and there, near and far, north and south, east and west, nowhere and somewhere, The Grotto exists. It is elusive, relying entirely on soft architecture to gesture towards elements of life that feel familiar. A movement or form or sound or visual. The Grotto begs to engage tension, the feeling of the uncanny that reveals itself when the intersection of waking life and a dreamed world is held in paralysis. This exhibition engages the works of four artists; Abby Kettner, Danan Lake, Ghisland Sutherland-Timm and Ramolen Laruan to provide a latticed network of anchor points that usher the viewer in their experience of the Grotto on display. Curated by Avalon Mott.
Xpace Cultural Centre
2-303 Lansdowne Ave, Toronto
February 10 - April 6 2024
Wednesday - Saturday, 12pm - 6pm
Opening reception Friday February 9, 7pm - 10pm
Exhibition Essay - https://www.xpace.info/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Main-Space_The-Grotto_Essay-1.pdf
Abby Kettner
The notion of memory is a chimerical dream investigates the fragility and fallibility of memory by representing the mind as a construction site. Recent studies have revealed that forgetting is not a glitch in our memory, but a distinct and purposeful force. Using every-day objects from interior and exterior spaces in the artist’s life, the ever-fading, intangible ghosts of past thoughts, feelings, and experiences are captured in the bioplastic sculptures. They will eventually deteriorate as just the memories do, becoming an unearthly reification of how memory functions in the brain.
“We are our memory, / we are this chimerical museum of shifting forms, / this heap of broken mirrors” - Jorge Luis Borges
Abby Kettner (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and arts-administrator based in Toronto. Kettner graduated with a BFA in Cross-Disciplinary Art: Life Studies from OCAD University, and her artistic practice continues to evolve as she explores object-oriented ontologies through her unique visual language. Interested in collaboration and community art projects,
Kettner works with the Carrier Bag Collective to develop accessible workshops for artists.
Images by Em Moor.
Danan Lake
Floor Harp is a platform or walkway that amplifies and augments your footsteps. The vibration caused by footsteps causes the strings that run underneath to resonate. This sound is an accompaniment to footsteps.
An Excerpt of the Story of the Inexperienced Ghost, uses an Arduino microcontroller to program the turn signal of a motorcycle to read an excerpt of “The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost” by H.G. Wells in Morse code.
Danan Lake, originally from rural British Columbia completed his BFA at NSCAD in 2020. He is now in the final year of his MFA at the University of Guelph. Lake’s work is rooted in folk culture, often incorporating DIY and handmade elements. Fiction, folklore and music are themes often dealt with in Lake’s work. His sculptural practice combines these influences resulting in works that are influenced by fictional tropes and function as instruments, inviting performance or performing themselves.
Images Em Moor.
Ramolen Laruan
Tabo, a small water dipper, is a quotidian object in Filipino households utilized to hold water from a filled timba (a bigger plastic pail) for bathing, hand washing, and chores. It is valued for its efficiency in water usage. In bomba/groundwater, tabos are piled up as a fountain where water flows to investigate the disproportionate flow of power and resource from the top to bottom. Water scarcity is frequent in many parts of the Philippines, making the region highly vulnerable to the impacts of Western-led climate change. The installation offers a metaphoric rethinking of human and non-human relationships in exploring the (un)monumentality of fountains as starting point in broader issues of power, legacies of colonization, depletion of Earth’s sources, and social relations.
In various culture, flowing water symbolizes purification, change, the passage of time, the cycle of life, rebirth, while the sound and colourful plastic world of tabo might bring to mind the everyday joy and chaos of life out of control.
Ramolen Laruan is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in Tkaronto/Toronto, ON. Her non-medium specific practice explores displacement, migration, and politics of knowledge with questions relating to notions of truths, memory work, and failure tactics through sculpture, collage, print, textile, installation, moving image and sound. She has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council. Select exhibitions include an intimate index at Latcham Art Centre (2022), Double-Edged at Xpace Cultural Centre (2022); still, unfolding at Zalucky Contemporary (2020). In 2021, Laruan participated in R.A.R.O, an artists-in-residence program in Barcelona. Laruan was selected to participate in the RBC Emerging Artist Program at The Power Plant in 2022. Laruan holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from Queen’s University, and a Masters of Fine Art from the University of Western Ontario.
Images by Em Moor.
Ghislan Sutherland-Timm
Ingraining the tactility of image-making twelve analog collages emulsify within organic ingredients and beings through salt, moss, sugar, and earth. Activated through the participant’s touch, your presence isn’t here is a series of ephemeral works highlighting fragmentations of identity and fractured placement. Through diaristic documentation of collaged bodies, touch becomes an intimate contribution to the emulsions performance of decay. In letting go of what we initially see, memory, in time passing, forms a space to become an unreliable narrator. “your presence isn’t here” prompts the creation of an adaptation when the origins of stillness cannot remain.
Ghislan Sutherland-Timm (Je-iz-lan/Jess-lin) (they/she) is a multidisciplinary craftsman and amateur media archivist based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Their artistic practice is influenced by their ancestral ties and reconnection to their Afro-Vincentian heritage and Carib roots. Their work is also ignited by the ephemerality and tactility of sound and film. The process of collage-making is frequently utilized within their work to shape autobiographical-fictional narratives and subjects of ambiguous beings in addressing identity and land to unravel the mythologies and romanticization of home and homecoming.
Images by Em Moor.