Laura Millard: Time as was told

Laura Millard, Time as was told, HD video with sound, 2024

Laura Millard: Time as was told

September 11 – October 9, 2025
Opening Reception: September 11, 2025, 8 – 9pm
assemblage, Toronto

In August 2024, Laura Millard joined an invited group of artists and scientists to circumnavigate the Svalbard archipelago, and sail to the pack ice at 82 degrees north, through the Arctic Circle Alumni Residency. Svalbard is the fasting heating place on earth and Time as was told is Millard’s response to this voyage. Laura Millard’s work grapples with imagery that reflects the dramatic effects of climate change. She is interested in landscape imagery that moves beyond the sublime, the elegiac, and the grand, to explore the role visual art might play in our engagement with the climate crisis.

As the U.N. Climate Action Summit struggles to find ways to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, temperatures on Svalbard have already risen by 4 degrees Celsius. The permafrost and glaciers are melting at a speed no one could have predicted a few years ago.

We’re out of time.

Millard writes: “Circling a small piece of glacial ice in Hambergbukta I was thinking about time, how much we have, and how we measure it. Knowing rapidly melting polar ice has affected the Earth’s rotation, and therefore the length of the day, I saw a visual analogy between this glowing, rounded, melting piece of ancient ice and our planet. How do we count the days we have left? The minutes? The seconds? How does this representation of time stand in for our sense of connection to place?”

Laura Millard, Time as was told, HD video with sound, 2024

For more information:
Artist Website: lauramillard.com
The Arctic Circle Website: thearcticcircle.org/participants-special-program

assemblage

assemblage is a public-facing storefront space dedicated to the exhibition of emerging and established artists. assemblage embraces “liveliness”: our research and activities consider questions such as: how are we interconnected with our environment, communities, and non-human ecosystems? Knowledge sharing and dissemination take the form of workshops, exhibitions, publications, and seminars. Our goal is to remain fluid as we embrace complex issues, acknowledge entanglements, and foster inter- and cross-disciplinary practices.

assemblage
2015 Dundas Street West
Toronto, ON M6R 1W7
assemblage-gallery.com

Accessibility:
assemblage is accessible. As a storefront gallery, works are viewed from the street.

assemblage acknowledges the ancestral territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabeg and the Huron-Wendat, who are the original owners and custodians of this land. We also acknowledge the Métis, Inuit, and Indigenous urban communities who share these lands.