The Shell Projects

ummmmp - asinnajaq
In asinnajaq’s words, ummmmp is an attestation of love for Inuit come and gone and still with us. It is an acknowledgment of life, love, and loss.

asinnajaq’s practice is led by a care and generosity towards images. The work presented at *Queenspecific in Toronto’s Queen West neighborhood speaks to a sister work presented in May at The New Gallery in Calgary’s east village. In their kindred visuals, the two pieces share the desire of memorialisation critical in remembrance. The high visibility and simultaneous temporariness of both exhibition spaces are important aspects to reflect upon in relation to how they are deployed vis-a-vis the marginalized realities of the unhoused across the country and the related realities of gentrification, housing exploitation, and barely existing social infrastructures. asinnajaq’s work overlays these interlinked social realities with a politics of care characterized by the intimacy, openness, and celebration necessary to caring for community.

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asinnajaq is the daughter of Carol Rowan and Jobie Weetaluktuk. She is an urban Inuk from Inukjuak, Nunavik and lives in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). asinnajaq’s art practice spans many mediums from film to performance video, to curation and much in between. She co-created Tilliraniit, a three day festival celebrating Inuit art and artists. asinnajaq wrote and directed Three Thousand (2017) a short sci-fi documentary. She co-curated Isuma’s show in the ‘Canadian’ pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. She was long listed for the 2020 Sobey Art Award. She co-curated the inaugural exhibition INUA at the Qaumajuq. Asinnajaq’s work has been exhibited at art galleries and film festivals around the world.

Procession by Alix Pearlstein

*QueenSpecific
787 Queen Street West

November 8 - January 8, 2022

the shell projects is excited to finally present Procession a window exhibition by Alix Pearlstein at *QueenSpecifc.

We first had the pleasure of encountering Pearlstein’s work at the ASHES/ASHES space in New York City in February 2019. INTERIORS championed the interdisciplinary and temporal span of Pearlstein’s work with small collages and video works on monitors, all within a highly stylized 1970s pop interior. Many months– and then years–followed, and we kept thinking about that show and about Pearlstein’s practice.

Then, early in the pandemic, we decided to reach out and encountered the artist’s tremendous generosity in thinking through which of the many distinct and all still terribly relevant projects throughout the course of her career would best suit a long window that required vinyl presentation in the winter.

Procession is nothing like what we saw in that first viewing of Pearlstein’s work, but in its haunting and insistent presence, it’s exactly like that exhibition too. At *QS “Procession" is a still from a short video of the same name from 2012. It is part of a group of works that we’d encourage you to seek out! Each of the works utilizes a lite-panel as a prop: here, it tethers a group of actors, illuminating their faces and white shirts as they move through an otherwise dark space, suggesting either a drowning out of light from the space or its absorption by the panel: an apt metaphor if there ever was one for the cold dark times of the winter solstice.

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Alix Pearlstein's work in video, performance, installation and sculpture has been widely exhibited internationally. Selected solo exhibitions include ASHES/ASHES, NYC, UK Art Museum, Lexington KY; Upfor Gallery, Portland OR; On Stellar Rays, NYC; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; Ballroom Marfa, Texas; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; CAM, St. Louis; The Kitchen, NYC and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge MA. Performances have been seen at Aspen Art Museum, Art Basel, Miami and The Park Avenue Armory, NYC.

untitled
by Andrew Harding

*QueenSpecific
787 Queen Street West
August 6 - September 6, 2021

the shell projects is so pleased to present untitled a window exhibition by Andrew Harding at *QueenSpecifc.

We spent the long winter of distance talking with Andrew over Zoom about what he’d like to show in the window. Harding was in the middle of working on a number of new projects, but continued to gravitate towards an earlier wire motive that he had not yet resolved. As spring slowly–and then very quickly–moved into all our lives, the barbed wire came into focus as a clear, direct and effective image for the window.

In the artists’ own words: “Unconsciously, I found myself using symbols and objects that all represent a barrier of sorts, ones that trap and submerge and surround and obscure. Barriers that are both visible and invisible.” Indeed, the barbed wire, as pattern, texture, symbol, is ubiquitous in the daytime. It does not recede or advance, but affirms itself on the Queen West strip, part of the quotidian in the most mundane and terrifying ways. In the night time, it expands. Bouncing into the street, multiplying by projecting shadows on the walls surrounding it, it glows in the dark.

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Andrew Harding is a Métis artist based in Toronto/Tkaronto. Creating hybrid sculptures he is focused on making curious installations from found and fabricated objects. Andrew is a current MFA candidate in the Visual Arts program at York University.

An Ear Against the Wall
by Parker Kay

*QueenSpecific
787 Queen Street West
December 14 - January 29, 2021

Working with Parker Kay is always a tremendous pleasure and the shell projects is happy to present An Ear Against the Wall, a window exhibition at *QueenSpecifc.

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Begun in 2016, An Ear Against the Wall is an ongoing act of documenting the demolition of a neighbourhood parking garage and the subsequent (re)development of the area. Kay revisits the site, wandering along the outskirts of temporary fences, the brush of a tree-lined clearing, the footsteps in the snow, on hot summer days, in a tepid rainshower and at dusk in autumn, discerning the meandering emotional geographies that appear briefly only to disappear again as construction continues. As Kay states, “the drift is a form of protest.” The titles in the video are an integral part of this project. A facet of Kay’s writing practice, they materialize how the artist’s durational engagement with space evolves lines of thought.

Growth emerges: in the distance, with cranes looming on the horizon as buildings rise over time, and in the foreground, as residents create paths across the field and resist others. Although figures are largely absent in the video, their presence is constantly felt: as if telling us something of the way the city is pushing them out, abstracting people in the name of progress. Indeed, “progress” is a term that Kay questions both in this video and in praxis. Throughout his work, he actively pays tribute to the buildings that remain, to the concrete lines that run through our city, and to the provisional walking paths built through sheer defiance as the city erases these various parts to make space for the new.

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Parker Kay is a multidisciplinary artist and writer currently working in Toronto. Kay’s practice implements experiential research and qualitative mapping to explore how place-making permeates our lives and marks our landscapes. As an avid urban explorer, Kay has led walking and cycling tours with the Jane’s Walk Festival and the Ontario Association of Architects (OAA); he also has worked on projects with Myseum of Toronto and the Vancouver Biennale. Kay’s writing has been published in C Magazine, SITE, Cornelia, Peripheral Review; and he has exhibited at Modern Fuel (2020), Sibling (2019), Motel Brooklyn (2017), The Toronto Reference Library (2017), and TOWARDS (2016). In 2019 Kay founded Pumice Raft, a project space in Toronto’s west end, to explore more curatorial projects.

Kay is currently a researcher and collections manager at The Archive of Modern Conflict and on the board of directors at Art Metropole.