Remains | Group show of guest artists

Aug 7 - 10

Opening Reception: Aug 7, 5 - 8pm

Artists Caro Simon, Patrick Stochmal, Marina Diolaiti, Callum Donovan-Grujicich, Ariane Labbé, Sohyun Yoon and curated by Maddy Young

REMAINS presents the work of six emergent artists working in the fields of contemporary sculpture, installation, and new media.

Materials and memories: remains are the lively afterlives of things.To remain isn’t to be rigid or immobile, as the imperative ‘remain!’ implies. Remains are finicky and not easily categorized, stuff that is left over around the edges or that has wiggled free from its original context. Transformations from originals to remnants draw into question the processes of iteration, copy, and decay. Networks of remnants reshuffle and connect distant places and times, and the remnant object allows for an exploded notion of presence that exists in multiplicity, in malleable time.

Ariane Labbé and Marina Diolaiti explore temporality in their works. Labbé’s churning machine “Dry Displacement” is a poetic expression of order and entropy in deep time. In “Left to a next of kin”, Diolaiti’s minimalist installation of differently-tensioned rubber bands gestures to time without events.

Caro Simon examines the body-infrastructure relationship in “Residuum”, inspired by connecting systems of water basins hidden below the city. Simon memorializes this in playful anti-monumental works. Callum Donovan-Grujicich’s “Medieval Corner” similarly displaces functional architecture into a gallery space, activating a corner with a representation of an archaic groin vault, which performs being structural. Sohyun Yoon collects urban architectural moments in “Remnant Project”, and shows how the viewer’s relationship to them change as they enter a video archive. Each of these artists explore spatiality: architectural, infrastructural, and otherwise.

In “Next of Kin”, “Eros”, and “Til Death Do Us Part”, Patrick Stochmal finds the remnants of shared queer intimacies as dynamic entities of their own, living and dying over again. In Stochmal’s work, the forested suburban enclave as a left-over and forgotten area of development presents alternative potentials in the heart of the prescriptive spatial, social, and temporal arrangements of suburbia.

Artist Bios:

Caro Simon is an interdisciplinary artist from Belgium/Luxembourg living and practicing in T’karonto(Toronto). She primarily works in sculpture/installation, poetry, printmaking and analog photography. Drawing from minimalist purposelessness and abstraction, her work examines the distanced modes of interactions between bodies and disregarded urban infrastructure as well as the anti-aesthetic in the context of postindustrial environments.

Patrick Stochmal is an interdisciplinary artist based in T’karonto (Toronto), Ontario working primarily through sculpture and performance to explore the intersections of ontology, queerness, and ecology. Employing open-ended processes of material contamination and deterioration, his work takes the form of collaborative engagements with non-human entities to consider expanded notions of kinship and the politics of embodiment. Seeking to disrupt human-centric perspectives of the world, he stages leaky encounters between the natural and synthetic and the human and non-human to investigate moments of their categorical coalescence and structural indeterminacy.

Toronto based contemporary artist Marina Diolaiti has been investigating spatial awareness and relations of shape and form for what seems to be a greater understanding of art in space. Through sculpture/installation based work, Diolaiti has expanded on these concepts in search of artistic resolutions. Exploring themes of reflection beyond representations of reality, her practice often results in the reduction of the human through the use of man made materials. Her work resonates with ideas founded in early minimalism and those of modern conceptual art aiming to urge a self reflection within viewers.

Callum Donovan-Grujicich is an emerging artist based in Toronto, Ontario, and working primarily in the disciplines of sculpture and installation. His practice is currently focused on intervention into historical narratives, often employing overtly contemporary materials and contexts to produce objects that present deliberate anachronism. Callum is currently completing a BFA in sculpture and Installation at OCAD University in Toronto.

Ariane Labbé is an emerging artist working mainly in sculpture and installation based in Toronto, ON. In 2021, she completed a DEC in Visual Arts with honours from Dawson College in Montréal and is currently completing a BFA in Sculpture and Installation at OCAD University in Toronto. She participates in group shows with her peers both at Dawson College, Montréal, and in galleries in Toronto.

Sohyun Yoon is an artist who navigates forms, images, and sounds, both individually and holistically. Central to Yoon's artistic inquiry is the documentation and preservation of contemporary societal artifacts, particularly those considered redundant or surplus. Through methodologies rooted in deconstruction, enumeration, and repetition, she delves deep into the underlying significances embedded within human-made constructs, unravelling layers of meaning and interpretation. Born and raised in Seoul, Yoon graduated with a degree in French literature. Following this, she pursued experimental work on interactions between space and village communities before relocating to Montreal. Subsequently, she decided to attend art school and is currently enrolled at OCAD University in Toronto. Yoon is acclaimed for her interactive face collage installations showcased at the university. Sohyun Yoon currently lives and works in Toronto.