Kicking off the Don River Valley Park’s 2019 Art Program, artist Nadia Belerique presented a new large-scale photo installation for the bus terminal windows at TTC’s Castle Frank Station from April 15 to July 1, 2019.
In her work, Belerique complicates the way we look at images. For above and below and so on forever, Belerique brought her studio outdoors in October 2018, composing and shooting a series of still life photographs in the Don River. Belerique staged found objects (bottles, shoes) in the river alongside existing ones (leaves, flowers). Many of the objects in the photos were collected from the Don River itself, with the help of filmmaker Seth Scriver, who has dredged and collected bottles and centuries-old objects in the area for years. Belerique then re-photographed the images in her studio through a pane of glass, lending the Don River an unusual and artificial new surface.
At Castle Frank the photographs follow the station’s architecture so that the sequencing of the bus terminal windows mimics the flow of the river. With the transparent nature of the photographs installed on glass, Belerique’s close framing of the river, and the shadows of passers-by through the station windows, the installation creates a strange sense of depth. The bottom of the river is indistinguishable from its surface, with objects and debris filtered through silted water and October sunlight. Castle Frank sits at street level, at the edge of the Don Valley, and the project literally brings the river up into the city, surrounding the viewer in a landscape that is as natural as it is altered, inhabited and manipulated.
Read about Belerique’s process creating this artwork in a conversation with Kari Cwynar, Curator of Evergreen’s Don River Valley Park Art Program.
About Nadia Belerique
Based in Toronto, Nadia Belerique constructs installations that engage with the poetics of perception and question how images perform in contemporary culture. She received her MFA from the University of Guelph and has exhibited at such venues as Grazer Kunstverein, Graz; Oakville Galleries; the Art Gallery of Hamilton; Daniel Faria Gallery, The Power Plant, and Gallery TPW, Toronto; and Kunsthalle Wien. Belerique was long-listed for the 2017 Sobey Art Award and is represented by Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto.
Support
above and below and so on forever is presented in partnership with Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival and Pattison Outdoor Advertising. The project was made possible with the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council.
