Plain text didactics
Manual Assembly: Fragments of a Whole
El Anatsui
Kevin Beasley
Wally Dion
Anthony Douglas Cooper
Jeneen Frei Njootli
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill
Kelly Jazvac
Jenine Marsh
Rosie Lee Tompkins
Manual Assembly: Fragments of a Whole is a group exhibition bringing together artists who use accumulation and assemblage as processes to entwine personal experiences and economic histories. The artworks in the exhibition are constructed from a gathering of assorted elements—from the discards of daily consumption to collections of precious materials, both natural and fabricated. The gathering and re-circulation of materials, such as old clothing, coins, and repurposed plastic scraps, are the basic elements for aesthetic contemplation and conduits for storytelling and identity building. The structure and techniques shaping the artworks merge with the material histories of their pieces becoming formal sites of introspection and signifiers of lived cultural experience.
We have divided our curatorial conversation into four categories, proposing a loose framework to an artistic process and technique that is as boundless as the endless materials available to assemblage. We start with “gathering” as it is the beginning process of any artist drawn to the practice of assemblage before we move to the concept of “economy” to address where the collected objects and materials come from. And then, through “poetics,” we posit why do we collect from which we draw from the speculative nature of spirituality and ritual which we ground with “place” to signal both home and identity.
Curated by Lillian O’Brien Davis and Jenifer Papararo.
Exhibition facilitation and production supported by Clara Halpern with art installation team for opening exhibitions Uroš Jelić (lead), Phu Bui, Corinne Carlson, Christian Echeverri, Matthew Koudys, Nykyta Kuzmicz, Nadine Maher, Jordan May, Manny Trinh.
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El Anatsui
El Anatsui is an established and influential Ghanaian sculptor who spent much of his artistic and pedagogical career in Nigeria. For over 50 years, his work has drawn international attention for his substantive and intricate metal weavings made from found bottle caps, aluminum cans, and other metal discards from consumer packaging. The scale of Anatsui’s works are essential to their meaning. His metal works are both brilliantly stunning, creating shimmering undulating surfaces that are sublime, expressing both beauty and angst. These often-grand artworks, magnificent in craft, scale, and appearance, are also menacing in the profound accumulation of discarded materials and the labour invested in their assembly. Anatsui’s work can be found in art collections across the globe, including Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, and the British Museum. In 2023, he was awarded the Hyundai Commission at the Tate Modern, for which he presented the monumental installation Behind the Red Moon.
For Manual Assembly: Fragments of a Whole, we present several of El Anastui’s artworks that include a mix of his paradigmatic aluminum liquor bottle cap assemblages as well as a recent wood wall sculpture. Repurposed materials in Anatsui ‘s work are both reified and representative as the artist forms them into massive abstract shapes. Anatsui’s consistent use of liquor caps is a formal and symbolical redress of the transatlantic slave trade, where alcohol was commonly traded for African people. The scale and beauty of these works are essential to their meaning, drawing connections between colonialism and over-consumption, waste and the natural environment. The epic scale of Anatsui’s metal works allow him the surface area needed to create an expansive visual field of colourful abstract patterns and undulating shapes that are magnificent in craft, scale, and appearance; they are also menacing in the profound accumulation of discarded materials and the labour needed for their assembly.
Anastui has a long history of working with reappropriated wood fragments, carving patterns across pieces of tropical wood such as walnut and mansonia which are combined into an overall tableau of lines and shapes, as represented by Commercial Avenue. The wood sculptures are abstract configurations built from flanks of used hardwood that, like his woven metal pieces, transform discarded objects into intricate, detailed, and spectacular forms. Both the metal and wood artworks represent our unbridled consumption, vividly captured and gloriously warped through methodical processes of accumulation, assemblage, and correlation.
Square gallery
east wall
Commercial Avenue, 2023. Aluminum bottle caps and tropical woods (walnut and mansonia).
south wall
Silver and Gold Have I Not, 2023. Aluminum and copper wire.
west wall
Obscured Narrative, 2022. Aluminum and copper wire.
All works courtesy the artist and Jack Shaiman Gallery, NY.
Kevin Beasley
Kevin Beasley was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, and currently lives and works in New York. He has developed a complex body of work that moves fluidly between mediums and genres, from sculpture to sound and performance. He is well-known for his early performances for which he made and activated sound sculptures, playing haunting and emotional compositions for live audiences. Beasley’s assemblage work often molds and freezes the adaptive and tensile strength of familiar materials in a fixed resin structure. He collects and transforms these materials in a manner that both condenses and refracts the original object’s meaning and function. Solo exhibitions include: In an effort to keep, Casey Kaplan, New York, 2023; On site, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, 2022; and A View of a Landscape, Whitney Museum, New York, 2019. Group exhibitions include Pansori: a soundscape of the 21st century, 15th Gwangju Biennale, 2024, Seven Rooms and a Garden: Rashid Johnson and The Moderna Museet Collection, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2023; and The Sound of Morning, Performa Biennial, New York, 2021.
Beasley’s resin sculptures included in Manual Assembly: Fragments of a Whole feature raw Virginia cotton and sourced clothing. There is an inextricable link between the cotton-farming legacy of the land in Virginia where his family is based and the clothing items that define their identities and shape their lives. Through his work, Beasley explores these links, where a house dress or pair of sneakers are conduits of memory for the wearer, such as a gift received or a remembered embrace from a beloved family member. Connections can be drawn between bodies and land, such as the cycle of cotton production which follows the path of exploitative circulation of raw resources under capitalism. Beasley contrasts the representation of these exploitative cycles by using materials that narrate tender and reciprocal relationships. In addition to preserving personal memory, Beasley’s use of cotton simultaneously explores the impact of the cotton and textile industries and other cycles of trade that perpetuate inequity.
Rectangle gallery
north wall
Site I, 2022. Polyurethane resin, raw Virginia cotton, altered t-shirts, house dresses.
Site XXII, 2022. Polyurethane resin, raw Virginia cotton, house dress, confetti t-shirts, confetti house dresses, altered t-shirts, altered house dresses, shoelaces, fiberglass.
center
Untitled (Emerging Block 002.17), 2017. House dresses, kaftans, t-shirts, durags, guinea fowl feathers, resin.
Untitled (Emerging Block 003.17), 2017. House dresses, kaftans, t-shirts, durags, guinea fowl feathers, resin.
Site I and Site XXII courtesy the artist, Regen Projects, LA, and Casey Kaplan, NY. Both untitled works courtesy the Rennie Collection, Vancouver.
Anthony Cooper Douglas
A Toronto-based artist, Anthony Douglas Cooper works across sculpture and installation and is known for his collaborations as a member of vsvsvs, a Toronto based art collective, studio project, and gallery space, and is also one of the founding members of Toronto-based gallery the plumb. Along with Laura Carusi and Kate Whiteway, Cooper co-curated a recent retrospective exhibition Andrew Patterson: Never Enough Night, which included talks, performances, and a publication. Cooper’s sculptures were recently in the group exhibition Vision321 curated by Hearth.
Stacks, Cooper’s work for Manual Assembly: Fragments of a Whole, is an ongoing sculptural and installation assemblage series made from found cylindrical objects the artist has sourced over 14 years, collected during day-to-day activities or on focused collection excursions in Toronto. Currently, he has amassed thousands of objects and from these, assembled over 2000 individual sculptures, creating intuitive “stacks” of varying size.
Through a repetitive process of collecting, sorting, and play, Cooper shifts these defunct utilitarian objects into formal sculptural gestures, with each found piece carrying the energy of its history, of which Cooper works to enhance in each assemblage. His process is guided by pattern recognition, with the analogy of language being most present as each object forms a letter that together forms words, which combines with other assemblages into meaningful sentences. Cooper always arranges these assemblages en masse. While each stack is a sculpture, their meaning is defined through their accumulative display in a space. Each time Stacks is installed, Cooper explores spatial and site-specific installation methodologies, extending the playful and repetitive process of making the work into a tracing of space and the audience’s experience.
Rectangle gallery
Stacks, 2010– ongoing. Found material.
All works courtesy the artist.
Wally Dion
Wally Dion is a member of Yellow Quill First Nation (Salteaux) located on Treaty 4 territory east of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Dion is known for his use of colour and functional material in creating large, patterned aesthetic fields. The artist’s early work often incorporated discarded computer circuit boards to create topographical murals, highlighting the technical pattern of information flow as entwined and grounded within the ecology of the land. These circuit board quilts resemble aerial landscape photography and geoscience imagery, referencing topographical image applications such as drone and aerial guided missiles systems and other military applications. His recent solo exhibition skodenstoodis at the College Art Galleries, University of Saskatchewan, featured a large site-specific neon work and a series of assemblages and paintings that reflected on the nomadic mobility of Indigenous life and its impact on culture. His work can be found in Canadian collections, including the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa, the SkArts in Regina, and the Canada Council Art Bank. Dion’s work has most recently been featured in the 2023 Bonavista Biennale in Newfoundland.
In Manual Assembly: Fragments of a Whole, we present a selection of Dion’s star blankets made from an assortment opulent materials from Organza, Tulle, Sheer Opalescence, and Lamé. He uses transparent materials that give the blankets a delicate and otherworldly quality, making them simultaneously visible and liminal. Their translucency creates a threshold, an opening and entry point into other dimensions, histories, and ways of seeing. When hung layered in front of each other, Dion’s star blankets become one conjoined but never static, reflecting a vibrating balance. Dion describes his star quilts as a way of “reflecting upon prairie tall grass and the reintroduction of bison into the Great Plains. I wanted to make several transparent quilts and superimpose them; one in front another… a quilt for the microbiome, another for the bison, their manure & hooves, another for the summer fires that scorch the ground, and a final quilt for the sweetgrass braid.”
Lobby nook, east to west
fire quilt, 2023. Fabric and copper pipe.
grass quilt, 2023. Fabric and copper pipe.
winter quilt, 2023. Fabric and copper pipe.
All works courtesy the artist.
Jeneen Frei Njootli
Jeneen Frei Njootli’s Fighting for the Title Not to Be Pending, 2020, is a beautifully poetic dematerialized artwork made of stunning glass beads, forming its shape under the weight of its own materiality as the beads are heaped and piled into a mound in this gallery, as well as sprinkled near and over the gallery’s exterior entrances. Once placed, the beads continue to shift and redistribute across the gallery floor and into the building’s cracks and crevices. This artwork by Frei Njootli references the artist directly, as the collective weight of beads correspond to the artist’s body weight. After each exhibition, not all the beads are fully recaptured as they have disbursed through the exhibition space, lost in the building’s recesses as a profound reminder of both the history of the land we occupy and the persistence of Indigenous culture.
Also included in Manual Assembly: Fragments of a Whole are several recent sculptures, two of which are a refashioned glove and mitten formally posed through applied resin to capture the veracities of remote, land-based living. Each garment is isolated from its pair, and as such they are markers of the seclusion of place as well as of the labor and protection needed to subsist in a northern landscape. These sculptures represent the intricate joy and resilience involved in sustaining oneself on the land through hunting and gathering, while celebrating the cultural importance of collective practices like beading and tanning, central to the original construction of these garments. This relation to sustenance and the land is also expressed in Frei Njootli’s stone assemblages, which are made from Ptarmigan gizzard stones, called gastroliths, which are eaten by the birds to assist with digestion. Holes are drilled into the stones, and they are hung on a simple cotton thread from a willow branch, mirroring the cyclical relation between the two materials: the birds use the stones to grind and digest the branches, their primary food source; this grinding polishes and smooths the stones.
Frei Njootli is a Vuntut Gwitchin, Czech, and Dutch artist living and working in their home territory of Old Crow, Yukon. Her work moves fluidly between performance, fashion, and sculpture, often commingling through installation, sound, her body, and a dedication to the dissemination and perpetuation of Indigenous ways of life. Some recent exhibitions of Frei Njootli’s work include Noise of the Flesh: Score for gina pane, FRAC Pays de la Loire, France, 2023; Indian Theatre, curated by Candice Hopkins at CCS BARD Hessel Museum, NY, 2023; I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality, UB Art Galleries, Buffalo, 2023; Transmissions, Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2022; Early Days: Indigenous Art, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Ontario, 2021; and Soft Water Hard Stone, New Museum Triennial in New York, 2021.
Various locations
Fighting for the Title Not to Be Pending, 2023. Glass beads, variable scale; weight of the artist’s body.
Square gallery
south wall
Covey, 2024. Ptarmigan gizzard stones, cotton, willow.
center
Improper functioning of the heart, 2024. Abandoned beaded leather glove, beaver fur, fleece, epoxy.
Towards Liberation, 2024. Leather fleece lined glove, ptarmigan foot, haywire, epoxy.
Fighting for the Title … courtesy the artist and Forge Projects, Ancram, NY. The rest courtesy the artist and Macaulay & Co. Fine Art, Vancouver.
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill is an artist and writer of Métis decent with maternal roots in the Michel Band and Papaschase who lives and works on the unceded lands of the Skwxwú7mesh, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Hill regularly uses found materials in her artwork as a means of inquiry into concepts of property and land ownership. Hill has held exhibitions and shown her work widely, most recently at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the 59th Venice Art Biennale; Le Magasin CNAC, Grenoble; and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. She is a member of BUSH gallery, an Indigenous artist collective that challenges Eurocentric art models by centering the land and Indigenous epistemologies.
Contemporary Indigenous advocacy is centred around resisting resource extraction, the global economic model that has historically played a role in the loss of political and economic autonomy for Indigenous societies. A part of this advocacy, Hill’s work explores economic models that are rooted in reciprocity rather than exploitation. Before colonization, tobacco was one of the most widely exchanged materials in the Americas; in Indigenous communities, it is still today shared as part of reciprocal economies—for example, as gifts and offerings, for ceremonies, and as medicine.
We include two of Hill’s tobacco flags and a selection of her spell drawings in Manual Assembly: Fragments of a Whole. The flags, made of sewn tobacco leaves, are both celebration and critique, reflecting the importance of tobacco in Indigenous history while exposing its colonial appropriation and exploitation for economic trade. The dimensions of Hill’s flags echo those of the American dollar bill. They also call to mind “tobacco notes,” the first forms of paper currency in British North American colonies.
The spell drawings also incorporate tobacco, with the paper used for each of the drawings having been repeatedly coated in tobacco-infused Crisco oil. On this saturated paper, Hill creates collages from materials she collects from her day-to-day life, from wildflowers to beer tabs.
Rectangle gallery
west wall, left to right
Spell #22, Thistles, 2024. Tobacco-infused Crisco oil, pigments on paper, magazine cutouts. Collection of Simon Cole.
Spell #23, Sculpture, 2024. Tobacco-infused Crisco oil, oil paint, magazine cutouts, nail. Collection of Simon Cole.
Spell #4, Billow, 2019. Tobacco-infused Crisco oil, oil paint, tobacco flower, tobacco pendant, magazine cutouts, thread.
Spell #1, 2018. Crisco oil, oil paint, tobacco flower, snake pendant, beer can tab, magazine cutout. Collection of Tave Cole.
Spell #12, Caves, 2020. Tobacco-infused Crisco oil, oil paint, magazine cutout. Private collection.
Spell #8, Sunset on Clark, 2019. Tobacco-infused Crisco oil, oil paint, wildflowers, beer can tab, tape. Private collection.
Square gallery
east wall
Dispersal, 2019. Virginia tobacco, Perique tobacco, thread, seed pods, support stocking, wood, found pole. Collection of John Cook.
north wall
Disintegration, 2019. Virginia tobacco, Perique tobacco, seed pods, wood, found pole. Collection of John Cook.
All works courtesy the artist with the support of Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto.
Kelly Jazvac
Kelly Jazvac is an artist working with plastic to probe the permanence of disposability. She is well known for her research-based exploration of plastiglomerates, stones consisting of a mix of molten plastic debris and beach sediment including sand, wood, and rock. Jazvac is a member of a plastic pollution research team The Synthetic Collective, which includes scientists, artists, and writers. Her collaborative art/science research has been published in scientific journals including Nature Reviews, GSA Today, and Science of the Total Environment. She is based in Montreal where she is an Associate Professor of Sculpture in Studio Arts at Concordia University.
As part of Manual Assembly: Fragments of a Whole, Jazvac re-orients how we might think about cycles of material use and accumulation by attentively rescuing discarded scraps. Incorporating repurposed materials drawn from advertising media blended with found materials such as reclaimed ash wood and repurposed consumer plastic found around the places they live and work, Jazvac explores the history of material as it transitions from a use-object to would-be useless objects. This work offers a rebirth of commercially oriented materials, expanding the possibilities of what it means to think about the re-use and circulation of organic and inorganic materials, but also reorients the found materials towards life, the body, and the paradoxes of consumption and desire entangled in today’s ecosystems. As we are coming to understand more and more clearly, plastics and other inorganic materials accumulate at troubling rates within our environments and our bodies. Jazvac makes this process visible, creating a sense of consequence and time for reflection with her environmentally focused artworks through formal gestures that appear improvisational and immediate in their composition and combination but are yet grounded in material knowledge and goals to redirect the power of these objects, images, and materals into new forms of care. The seeming spontaneity of her sculptural process is posed and crafted with an intentionality and balance that creates tension between the permanency of the plastic base of her materials and her artistic interventions.
Square gallery
center
Suck/Blow, 2022. Recuperated ash wood, found plastic, recuperated vinyl billboard, found wood, felt.
On Looker (Kylie), 2022. Recuperated PVC billboard, thread, ash wood recuperated from Parc Angrignon.
east wall
On Looker (Ariana), 2022. Recuperated PVC billboard, thread, ash wood recuperated from Parc Angrignon.
On Looker (Ariana) courtesy the artist and Royal Bank of Canada. The other two works courtesy the artist and Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montreal and Toronto.
Jenine Marsh
Jenine Marsh is a Toronto-based artist known for her provisional and tactile sculptural assemblages and installations that often incorporate coins, flowers, casts of the artist’s body, and other materials related to exchange practices and determinations of value. Through serialized processes of destruction and transformation, her works aim to cultivate illicit and intimate responses to the shared conditions of end-stage capitalism.
Marsh has most recently exhibited work at the Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver; Joe Project, Montreal; and Gianni Manhattan, Vienna. She was commissioned to present a new work as part of at Nuit Blanche Toronto 2023 and participated in residencies at AiR Bergen at USF Verftet; Rupert, Lithuania; the Banff Centre; and Vermont Studio Center.
For Manual Assembly: Fragments of a Whole, Jenine Marsh constructs a gathering space at the center of the gallery. Adorned with a collection of real and forged coins, preserved flowers, plastic buckets, and flowing water, Marsh’s provisional concrete sculpture references the common yet complex civic structure of the fountain. According to the artist, the title is a reference to the opening lines of George Orwell’s 1984: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” This sets the work in a fictional space outside of normal time, in which other futures are possible.
Here, the fountain is examined as a space which facilitates an interaction of infrastructure and architecture, of value and exchange, and of basic needs and unrealized desires. The fountain continually unfolds as an urban source of clean water; as an essential hub for social interaction, gossip, and rallying; and as a site for the enactment of an alternative economy, found in the act of throwing coins to make wishes. Joining the tangible to the intangible, Marsh’s installation situates the utopic as a tactile process of constructing alternative futures from the material world of the present.
Square gallery
center
Fountain for the Thirteenth Hour, 2024. Concrete, wood, buckets, plastic pond liner, water, pumps, wiring, mixed-currency coins, resin, epoxy clay, powdered metallic pigment, acrylic varnish, flowers preserved with synthetic rubber, steel wire, plastic flower stems, plastic bouquet wraps, solder, glass jars, glass bottles, various newspapers, scratch tickets, florist how-to booklet, horse racing program, detritus, gravel.
Courtesy the artist and Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto.
Rosie Lee Tompkins
Born in 1936 in Arkansas, Rosie Lee Tompkins has been called by the New York Times one of America’s greatest artists. Tompkins’ quilts are stunning examples of African American improvisational quilt-making, an art form with roots in African textiles and featuring found materials such as fabric scraps, old clothing, ties, dishtowels, and pillowcases. A common identifier of African American improvisational quilt-making is the irregular border arrangement, observable in this selection of Tompkins’ works. Improvisational quilters often work without measuring or predetermined designs, responding instead to their intuition or the rhythm of the material.
The spiritual is key to Tompkins’ work, as she regularly acknowledges God as her influence in the creation and structuring of her intuitive quilting patterns. Through gathering and amalgamating scraps of fabric, Tompkins uses her quilting practice as both diary and devotional, reflecting the power of the religious beliefs that informed how she experienced the world.
Tompkins often embroidered prayers, biblical verses, and names of loved ones into her work, visualizing the emotions and thoughts that were on her heart in response to events both personal and political. An untitled quilt features a textile depicting former American president John F. Kennedy, Baptist minister and civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., and American politician Robert F. Kennedy. A de-constructed American flag is collaged around the central portraits. Other quilts on display are demonstrative of the artists’ mastery of pattern, creating mesmerizing Op-art-inspired arrangements. The five quilts selected for display in this exhibition span three decades (1968–1996) and are strong examples of the various approaches Tompkins’ took in her improvisational quilting practice.
Tompkins moved to California with her family in 1958, part of what is known as the Second Great Migration where Black and racialized people from the American South migrated to the northeast, midwest, and west. One of Tompkins’ best-known quilts features autobiographical details, visible in the repeated stitching of the name Effie (the artist’s legal name was Effie Mae Howard) along with her birthday (September 6, 1936), as well as the distinctive colour palette of her chosen home of Richmond, CA. This quilt also references the presence of Indigenous Ohlone people, using then-current visuals of Indigenous people which will appear out of date to contemporary viewers. While Tompkins’ depictions do not accurately represent traditional Ohlone regalia, Tompkins’ intention was to depict her context. As a Black migrant from the south, Tompkins would have been just as aware of the ongoing forced displacement of Indigenous people from their land as the growing movement for civil rights in the United States.
Shown for the first time in Canada, Tompkins quilts share a perspective on Black life through the lens of the feminine and the domestic. Tompkins’ quilts were often sold by the artist at flea markets as a supplementary income for the artist and homemaker. It is important to note that, as an artist, Tompkins often purposely did not add backing to her quilts as she intended them for display rather than as functional objects.
Rectangle gallery
center (on plinth)
Untitled, 1968. Cotton, felt, wool, velvet, velveteen, found and repurposed embroidered fragments (variously decorated with chenille, wool thread, needlepoint, shisha mirrors, and other materials), crocheted doilies, silk crepe, decorative trim (with beading, sequins, faux pearls, leather, rhinestones, and other materials), hand-painted velvet, cotton thread embroidery, and printed drapery backing.
east wall, left to right
Untitled, circa 1987; Polyester double knit and cotton backing.
Untitled, 1985; Velvet, velveteen, velour, panné velvet, chenille, cotton-polyester broadcloth, and cotton backing.
Untitled, 1996; Wool flannel, decorative trim (with beads, rhinestones, sequins, and faux pearls), wool, silk, velvet, cotton lace, cotton yarn, and cotton muslin backing.
south wall
Untitled, 1996; Velvet, found hand- and machine-embroidered fabric, United States flags made of rayon and cotton, woven wool, batik, polyester velour, cotton muslin, rayon linen, gabardine, cotton print fabric, and cotton muslin backing.
All works courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Bequest of The Eli Leon Living Trust.