Traces at Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto

Daniel Faria Gallery is pleased to present Traces, a group exhibition featuring works by Nadia Belerique, Shannon Bool, Andrew Dadson, Derek Liddington, Oluseye, and Jennifer Rose Sciarrino. The works in Traces are occupied with what has been left behind: detritus, fingerprints, markings, forgotten histories, shadows, echoes. To trace can be to outline, to copy, to follow—backwards or forwards (trace my steps; retrace my steps). It is looking for the source, searching. It can be just enough of something to leave evidence, to leave a mark. A clue, a path.

Dadson’s Cuneiform (2012-ongoing) is a series of photographs depicting spots where signs such as those declaring NO PARKING, NO SKATEBOARDING, and NO LOITERING have been removed, the leftover glue creating accidental marks that are often “surprisingly calligraphic and painterly.”[1] Shown together, they create their own typology, their title referencing one of the oldest writing systems. Similarly capturing the residue of an action, Belerique’s photographic series The Archer (2014) is made using a digital home-office scanner. Real objects—some more recognizable than others—float on a surface of gradated greys and blacks, created by Belerique’s manipulation of light from the scanner and the room, which together act as a surrogate aperture. Scattered across all the images are the artists fingerprints—marks and smears leftover from her arrangement of items atop the glass of the scanner, assembling and creating the images we see.

First exhibited at the MOCA GTA Triennial in 2021, Ploughing Liberty is an ongoing series born from Oluseye’s research on the migration of Loyalists, Jamaican Maroons, and fugitive slaves who moved to Nova Scotia and Ontario in the late 18^th century, often with the near impossible task of farming a hard and unforgiving landscape. The antique farm tools, worn with hard use, reference those who spent their lives trying to make the rocky, infertile land arable. Fusing these tools with discarded hockey sticks—a sport from which Black presences are often elided—the resulting works bring up questions of labour and leisure, belonging and exclusion, within the Canadian settler state. “Close inspection of the sculptures reveals the traces of use in the wood. These imperfections appear as historical repositories, or precise markers of bygone labour and play. The places on the farming tools where the handles appear slim denote wear; the work of hands making wood smooth.”[2] These works also link the history of Black labour in Canada with the present-day labour of agricultural workers from the Caribbean and Latin America on Ontario’s farms, where close to 27,000 temporary foreign workers were employed in 2021.

In Liddington’s work, The plant proceeded to tip as I drew it, at which point I made the decision to let it fall as I felt it would improve the composition. (2015), the object of his still life drawing is covered with canvas as he attempts to capture its form, reproducing its physical qualities through touch and, to some degree, memory. Sciarrino’s sculpture North Facing on December 21 (2014) also depicts something unseen. In a 3D rendering program, Sciarrino builds a fictional public sculpture. Within that digital world, sunlight is then projected on to the imagined sculpture, as it would be cast on the 21^st of December, the shortest day of the year. Sciarrino then copies the lines of the sculpture’s shadows, which are finally water jet cut into a block of concrete as if traced on a public sidewalk.

Bool’s silk paintings are based on images of different architectural bodies that she then abstracts by “collaging” grids over them on the computer. Spreegold (2026), is based on the façade of an Art Deco/Fascist building, while Veiled Façade (2026) is based on an experimental building made of fabric. Using chiffon silk and a batik painting technique, with wax, oil paint and textile paint, the resulting patterns form once the wax is removed and the painting’s negative space is revealed. The thin silk is then stretched over a mirror, so that the painting reflects itself, its surroundings, and the viewer’s own body. In this manner, Bool takes the static modernist grid and opens it up to the environment, making it unfixed and negotiable.

[1] Emmy Lee Wall, Andrew Dadson: Over the Sun, Exh. Cat. Vancouver Art Gallery, 2015.

[2] Neil Price, “On Labour, Liberty, and Art in the Work of Oluseye,” Studio Magazine, Spring/Summer 2023.