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DonatePublished on May 18, 2024
Stellar Narratives and Dastgāh take centre stage at Evergreen Brick Works this June
Toronto, ON, May 14, 2024 — Public Art at Evergreen is debuting two distinct public artworks on June 3 at Evergreen Brick Works. These immersive new installations, Quinn Hopkins’s Stellar Narratives: An Urban Indigenous Odyssey and Mani Mazinani and Sanaz Mazinani’s Dastgāh, offer unique perspectives that blend ancestral knowledges, cultural heritage, and storytelling within the urban landscape.
Public Art at Evergreen focuses on the interconnected histories of the Evergreen Brick Works site and surrounding ravine system with a focus on Indigenous, cultural, ecological and industrial narratives. Stellar Narratives will appear in Koerner Gardens until June 2025 and Dastgāh will be on display in the North Pavilions until October 31, 2024.
Quinn Hopkins’s Stellar Narratives is a diptych mural that depicts Anishinaabe cosmologies using augmented reality, inviting viewers to discover the ancestral stories and star knowledge etched in the stars above them. By superimposing digital content onto the physical world, Stellar Narratives demonstrates how technology can be used to preserve Indigenous knowledges in contemporary urban life.
“Stellar Narratives aims to bridge the gap between urban Indigenous people and the ancestral wisdom embedded in Indigenous storytelling,” says Quinn Hopkins, whose Anishinaabe-Métis heritage informs his work. “It’s a reminder that the land’s deep knowledge is still with us, even in the heart of the city.”
Mani Mazinani and Sanaz Mazinani’s Dastgāh playfully reimagines the chang, an ancient Iranian harp as a giant, walk-in instrument. The sound sculpture introduces musical intervals found in traditional Maqam practice—the modal music system stretching between Central Asia and North Africa—to the Don River Valley ravines, decentering the 12 tones used in classical and contemporary music.
“Dastgāh asks visitors to pause, open their ears and listen differently,” curator Charlene K. Lau says. “Nestled in the Don River ravines amidst urban trails and the Don Valley Parkway, Dastgāh invites us to stitch different sounds together and co-create a new soundtrack to the Don River Valley.”
Quinn Hopkins
Quinn Hopkins, an avant-garde Anishinaabe-Métis artist from Toronto, Turtle Island, fearlessly weaves together the threads of tradition and innovation in his unique artistry. As an artist and advocate for his generation, Hopkins is at the forefront of the new wave of Indigenous art, combining the highest quality materials and robust digital platforms to mold the future of artistic expression. His portfolio boasts exhibitions such as BACA 2022, Ice Follies 2023, and the Thunder Bay Art Gallery’s Woodland POP!.
Mani Mazinani
Mani Mazinani (b. 1984, Tehran) is a Toronto-based artist making work that connects scale and sensation, improvisation and ancient thought. His practice includes installation, video, film, sculpture, photography, multiples, sound, and music and directs attention to the physicality of his subject medium, creating situations to exercise our perceptual systems. He has presented projects internationally at venues including Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, Tate Modern, The Bentway, Tehran International Electronic Music Festival, and the Suzhou Culture and Arts Centre. Mazinani’s sound/music projects have been published internationally and on his own experimental record label, Aerophone Recordings.
Sanaz Mazinani
Sanaz Mazinani (b. 1978, Tehran) is an artist, educator, and curator based in Tsí Tkarón:to. Working across the disciplines of photography, sculpture, and large-scale multimedia installations, Mazinani creates informational objects that invite a rethinking of how we experience the world, suspending the viewer between observation and knowledge. Mazinani is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and her work is held in public collections such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the City and County of San Francisco.
