Thresholds of Perception
Where image, memory and agency intersect
Shelagh Howard | Sally Buck | Horst Herget
Thresholds of Perception
October 23 – 26, 2025
Opening Night: October 23, 6 – 9pm
Workshop – Looking to See with Sally Buck: October 25, 1 – 2:30pm
Artists in Dialogue, with Sonja Scharf and Kelly Kyle: October 26, 1 – 2:30pm
Daylight Studio, Toronto
Thresholds of Perception brings together three distinct bodies of work that challenge the limits of seeing, remembering and understanding. Through layered photographic processes, sculptural interventions, and material dislocations, the artists invite viewers to slow, consider, and dwell in newly-articulated visual spaces: those between clarity and distortion, presence and erasure, perception and revelation.
In Distorted Flesh, Sally Buck commits contested botanicals to layered refractions using water, glass, and lenses. Foregrounding the body as both a site of pleasure and a subject of political forces, the project takes its cue from feminist phenomenology. The resulting glitchy imagery—born of light rather than code—resists prescribed objectivity, offering instead a deeply subjective and sensorial field of vision.
Sally Buck, Fever Glitch
Shelagh Howard’s The Secret Keepers traces the hidden terrain of intimate partner abuse through an intentionally arduous, seven-stage process. Integrating long exposures, tintypes, and silver prints, the work holds and mirrors cycles that index those of abuse and survival. What remains visible is as important as what is lost—each obliteration and trace reflecting the erosion and reclamation of self.
Shelagh Howard, Truly Madly Deeply, detail, The Secret Keepers
In Simulacrum by Horst Herget, time becomes elastic. Freestanding wet plate and plexiglass sculptures combine human forms, objects, and scenes in both positive and negative, allowing viewers to move through, around, and within moments, perceptually constructing new ones. Rejecting the “decisive moment,” the work opens a multiplicity of timelines where perception folds into perspective and back again.
Horst Herget, Simulacrum, detail
Together, these works navigate and give form to interstitial zones-where image, body, memory and agency intersect. Thresholds of Perception asks not just what we see, but how we move through experiences of vision, and under what critical conditions what is seen unravels into what is remembered.
Opening Night: October 23, 6 – 9pm
An evening of art and music, wine and cheese. Live jazz by the Riverdalians with the artists in attendance.
Workshop – Looking to see with Sally Buck: October 25, 1 – 2:30pm
A guided discovery of three featured artworks, using deep looking to reveal new ways of seeing and understanding. Participants will slow their gaze and engage the senses, examining forms and their design within each piece. See how perception deepens our understanding of artistic decisions, and transforms the meanings we make of photographs.
Artist Talk and Panel Discussion: October 26, 1 – 2:30pm
Guest moderators Sonja Scharf and Kelly Kyle, co-founders of Akasha Art Projects, will guide an engaging conversation with the exhibiting artists.
About the Artists
Sally Buck is an award winning photographer, street artist and and 2SLGTBQ+ woman living in so-called Vancouver. Using photography and photo montage, she captures the superimposed qualities of transitional spaces, the slide of multiple climates, and the confluence of visual cultures.
Functioning in public, urban spaces, her art and workshops embody our desire for organic growth within civic demarcations, our flourishing through non-prescribed activity, and our experience of change through eco-and art-historical storytelling.
Buck earned a Master’s degree in Visual and Performing Arts in Education at the University of British Columbia, and a B.A. (Honours) degree in Art History at Queen’s University, Canada. She’s taught art interpretation at universities, galleries and museums including the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation in Venice, Italy and the Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada.
Shelagh Howard is an award winning, photo based artist and member of the LGBTQ+ community whose work delves into the layered terrain of memory, identity, and embodied experience. Through long exposures and the human figure, she explores the construction of selfhood – interrogating themes of gender, generational trauma, vulnerability and intimacy.
With an unflinching gaze, she peels back the slick surfaces of constructed identity to reveal the tenderness beneath. Her images thread motion and stillness, capturing the ephemeral shadows of the self and offering a fleeting glimpse of what lingers behind our carefully assembled facades.
Shelagh was born in Toronto and lives in Halifax/Mi’kma’ki, Nova Scotia. She received an honourable mention at the 14th and 26th Annual Julia Margaret Cameron Awards in Barcelona, Spain, received the 2021 Artist Award from the Cornell Henry Art Gallery in San Diego and is in the top 200 finalists of Photolucida Critical Mass in 2025.
www.shelaghhoward.art
@shelaghhowardart
Horst Herget is a wet plate photographer based in Toronto. His otherworldly images are created with hand-built sets, ethereal lighting, and a touch of mystery. The distinct subtleties of each wet plate depict the nuances of our presence.
As an engaged member of the wet plate community for over a decade, Horst is frequently sought after for speaking engagements and tintype portrait sessions. In addition to private lessons and multi-day workshops, he has shared his experiences as a panellist with the Artists’ Network, has been an invited instructor during the Contact Photography Festival, and hosts a monthly photography salon at his studio – the Alternative Process Social – for the local photography community.
The wet plate or collodion process is a 1850s photographic process. It requires that the photographer also be a chemist to prepare the solutions using 19th-century formulas. Just before taking the exposure, the photographer makes the film, either on a metal plate, a tintype, or a glass plate, an ambrotype, in the darkroom. The wet plate film is very slow by modern standards, necessitating a long exposure time. The plate needs to be developed right afterward, exposing it, or it will not keep. The finished plate is then coated with archival varnish, preserving it well into the next century.
Daylight Studio
28 Industrial St, Unit 222
Toronto, ON M4G 1Y9
www.daylightstudiotoronto.ca
Gallery Hours: October 24 – 26, 12 – 5pm
Accessibility: Daylight studio is on the second floor, and is unfortunately stair access only.
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