Thursday, February 6, 2025, at 2:30 pm
Careful Pressure
Kai Recollet and Shannon Garden-Smith in conversation, moderated by Clara Halpern
In the Pavilion
Join urban Cree scholar, artist, and writer Kai Recollet in dialogue with artist Shannon Garden-Smith, whose work Tracks and traces and changes, 2024, is currently on view in The Goldfarb Vitrines.
For Kai Recollet, sand is always shoaling, bringing forth new secrets. Recollet will share a pedagogy of careful pressure, processual encounters inspired by sediment mineral kin, meteor craters, petroforms, leaf imprints, and feminist somatic practices. Grounded in this moment when Ojibwe constellation Biboonkeonini, the Wintermaker, graces the sky, Recollet uses the form of a glossary as a point of departure to consider future ancestor movements and the potential of the emplaced archive as a portal to another kind of being.
Shannon Garden-Smith will discuss tactility and touch, her ongoing work on sand, and her current installation in The Goldfarb Vitrines, which focuses on anonymous traces left by human and more-than-human inhabitants of the city. The project emerges out of a practice of walking or moving with land/sand, following it through official archives as well as through the form of the built city. Garden-Smith proposes that moving with leads to a new engagement with buried, scattered, and erased entanglements with land. To move with is to reflect on the ways that settler colonialism has shaped the city, and the untenable extractive flows of geo-ecological matter that comprise our built world, in a manner that considers alternative futures.

Shannon Garden-Smith, Upright is fine, but downright is where I am, 2021. artist’s book, 9 × 12 in, edition of 7.
Kai Recollet is an urban Cree scholar, artist, and writer whose work focuses on relationality and care as both an analytic and technology for Indigenous movement-based forms of inquiry within urban spaces. Recollet works collaboratively with Indigenous dance-makers and scholars to theorize forms of urban glyphing. She is in conversation with dance choreographers, Black and Indigenous futurist thinkers, and Indigenous and Black geographers as ways to theorize and activate futurist, feminist, celestial, and decolonial land-ing relationships with more-than-human kinships, and each other. Kai Recollet is Associate Professor at the Women & Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto and holds a PhD from Trent University.
Shannon Garden-Smith is an artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto of Scottish and Irish settler heritage. Garden-Smith is currently pursuing her PhD in Visual Art at York University, having previously earned an MFA at the University of Guelph. Primarily working across sculpture and installation, Garden-Smith engages with the mutability and poetics of the lithic environment. She seeks to unsettle naturalized relationships to its extraction, drawing on sand and stone’s ability to hold complex possibilities for time, memory, and different futures. Her work has been exhibited at Nuit Blanche, Tkaronto/Toronto; Centre Clark (Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal, QC); Art Museum, University of Toronto; Patel Brown, Tkaronto; The Bows, Mohkínstsis/Calgary; Franz Kaka, Tkaronto; Gallery TPW, Tkaronto; and TIER: The Institute for Endotic Research, Berlin, amongst others.