Careful Pressure: Kai Recollet and Shannon Garden-Smith in Conversation

Shannon Garden-Smith, Upright is fine, but downright is where I am, 2021. Artist’s book, 9 × 12 in, edition of 7.

The Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery of York University presents:

Careful Pressure: Kai Recollet and Shannon Garden-Smith in Conversation

Moderated by Clara Halpern

Thursday, February 6, 2025, 2:30 pm
The Pavillion (located inside The Goldfarb Gallery, Toronto)
RSVP at TheGoldfarbGallery.ca

Please join urban Cree scholar, artist, and writer Kai Recollet in dialogue with artist Shannon Garden-Smith, whose work Tracks and Traces and Changes (2024) is currently on view in The Goldfarb Vitrines. The conversation will be moderated by Clara Halpern.

For Kai Recollet, sand is always shoaling, revealing new secrets. Recollet will share a pedagogy of careful pressure—processual encounters inspired by sediment mineral kin, meteor craters, petroforms, leaf imprints, and feminist somatic practices. Grounded in the moment when the Ojibwe constellation Biboonkeonini, the Wintermaker, graces the sky, Recollet will use the form of a glossary as a departure point to consider future ancestor movements and the potential of the emplaced archive as a portal to another kind of being.

Shannon Garden-Smith will discuss tactility and touch, her ongoing work on sand, and her current installation in The Goldfarb Vitrines, which focuses on anonymous traces left by human and more-than-human inhabitants of the city. Emerging from a practice of walking or moving with land and sand, her project follows these elements through official archives as well as the built environment. Garden-Smith proposes that moving with the land leads to a new engagement with buried, scattered, and erased entanglements with land. In doing so, she reflects on the ways settler colonialism has shaped the city and the untenable extractive flows of geo-ecological matter that comprise our built world, while considering alternative futures.

The event will take place in the Pavillion with a visit to Garden-Smith’s Tracks and traces and changes in our vitrines, located in the exterior colonnade of the Accolade East Building.

Kai Recollet. Photo: Courtesy the artist

Kai Recollet

Urban Cree scholar, artist, and writer, Recollet’s work focuses on relationality and care as both an analytic and a technology for Indigenous movement-based forms of inquiry within urban spaces. Recollet works collaboratively with Indigenous dance-makers and scholars to theorize forms of urban glyphing, theorizing and activating futurist, feminist, celestial, and decolonial land-ing relationships with more-than-human kinships. Recollet is an Associate Professor at the Women & Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto and holds a PhD from Trent University.

Shannon Garden-Smith. Photo: Vlad Lunin

Shannon Garden-Smith

Shannon Garden-Smith is an artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto of Scottish and Irish settler heritage. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Visual Art at York University, after earning an MFA from the University of Guelph. Garden-Smith works primarily across sculpture and installation, engaging with the mutability and poetics of the lithic environment. Her practice seeks to unsettle naturalized relationships to land extraction, focusing on the potential of sand and stone to hold complex possibilities for time, memory, and different futures.

This discussion is organized and moderated by Clara Halpern, assistant curator, exhibitions. For more information on this event and other programming at the gallery, please visit our website: TheGoldfarbGallery.ca

For media inquiries and accommodations, please email: TheGoldfarbGallery@yorku.ca

About the Gallery

The Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery of York University is a socially minded not-for-profit contemporary art gallery that is a space for the creation and appreciation of art and culture. It is a supported Unit of York University within the President’s Division. We are externally funded as a public art gallery through the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, local and international foundations, embassies, and our membership who support our program.

Location & Accessibility

The Goldfarb Gallery is located at York University, Toronto, at 83a York Boulevard. It is a one-storey wheelchair accessible building only 30 meters from the TTC York University subway stop on line 1 where there is also a Wheel-Trans stop. There is paid street parking on Fine Arts Road and at the Student Services Parking Garage (84 James Gillies Street).

The Goldfarb Gallery
83a York Boulevard
Toronto, ON M7A 2C5

Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Saturday, 12 – 5 pm
Always free