Published on April 25, 2023
Artist Jawa El Khash’s time-bending holograms will be launched May 3 at an opening reception and explore endangered wildlife in alternate realities.
TORONTO, ONTARIO (April 25, 2023) – Nestled in and around the historic brick press at Evergreen Brick Works, a series of holograms are bringing the plants and animals native to Toronto’s Don Valley to life. Starting on May 3rd with an opening reception, the installation will stay on site at the Young Centre until December 31, 2023.
The four holograms depict past, present and imagined future ecosystems present at the Brick Works and invite viewers on a journey of discovery and identification. Species like silver maple, rainbow trout, and monarch butterflies offer a memorial of a once thriving natural space and offer a vision of what can be if future generations repair and coexist with the natural world.
Visitors can visit the installation for free Thursday to Sunday from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM. There will also be an online Web GL experience (http://naturesalgorithm.xyz) where viewers can virtually explore the hologram worlds.
“El Khash’s Nature’s Algorithm imagines a future world with a thriving and nourished environmental ecosystem—something we hope to embody at Evergreen Brick Works,” says Charlene K. Lau, Curator at Evergreen. “Her project offers this hope for change, and a moment in which we might contemplate how our ecological pasts collide with the present and generations to come.”
Nature’s Algorithm is part of Evergreen’s Public Art Program—a series of curated and temporary public art projects that respond to the Indigenous, cultural, ecological, and industrial histories of the Evergreen Brick Works site and surrounding ravine system.
Jawa El Khash is an artist, technologist and researcher whose painting, holography, virtual reality, and online simulations play on the poetics of the everyday nature of living in the world. Her replicas of reality blur the line between the invisible and the visible, the real and the simulated, the fictional and the fact. El Khash was mentored by artist Morehshin Allahyari for the program Lead Time at the Art Gallery of York University (2020). Her work was featured in the solo exhibition The Upper Side of the Sky at Interaccess (2020) and in group exhibitions at Gallery 44 (2021), Western Front (2021), Mutek (2020 and 2021) and 5th Istanbul Design Biennial (2020). For more information about her exhibit, visit: Jawa El Khash: Nature’s Algorithm, 2023 | Evergreen.
Nature’s Algorithm is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. It is presented in partnership with Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.
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Evergreen is dedicated to making cities livable, green and prosperous. Since 1991, the national not-for-profit has been facilitating change in communities through connection, innovation and sustainable actions. We work with community builders across sectors to solve some of the most pressing issues cities face: climate change, housing affordability, and access to nature and public spaces. The Brick Works, located in Toronto’s ravine system, is a year-round destination where the world comes to experience sustainability in action. Once an industrial brick factory, it is an internationally renowned showcase of green design, an award-winning public space and a test site to pilot ideas that can be scaled across the country to shape our cities for the better.
