Carriers (Gravity-Fed), Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto

GTA 2024, Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto
Mar 22- Jul 28 2024
Curated by Ebony L. Haynes, Toleen Tolouq and Kate Wong

Rooted in an ongoing concern with material agency and the forces that shape relations with and within the environment, Catherine Telford Keogh uses formal and conceptual frameworks to mine the living and dead. For her newly commissioned work, Carriers (Gravity-Fed), the artist collected sedimented industrial waste from the bottom of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, New York, and, combining it with other bio-matter, foodstuffs, industrial materials,
and mold-blown glass, created a static system of conveyance. Housed on a sculptural structure that approximates a gravity-driven conveyor belt, various storage vessels hold matter that merges together and is flattened at the same time, and whose composition either sheds or takes on familiar meanings.

Through her processed-based research, Telford Keogh examines how material life cycles are enmeshed in ecological systems. She’s particularly interested in how long-dead organisms are unearthed to support industrial interests and capitalist desires; these materials are then processed and inscribed in sediment as waste. Central to this work are questions of containment and supply: what emerges when we consider the planet a “container of infinite resources”? How does the modernist desire to create environments that arrest both time and decay change our relationship to materials? This site-specific sculptural installation is a system that supports multiple relationships between materiality and essence. The coiled contraption breathes life into the ruin; with found and fabricated objects, it builds upon Telford Keogh’s research into deep time, embodied histories, consumer desire, and the life and movement of matter. The installation is a testament to the artist’s ongoing exploration of entropy, transformation, and the enmeshment of material life.

Greater Toronto Art 2024 (GTA24) is the second edition of MOCA Toronto’s recurring triennial exhibition, which was conceived in 2021 to look more closely and consistently at artistic practices with a connection to the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Featuring a constellation of twenty-five intergenerational artists, duos, and collectives, GTA24 looks back as much as it looks forward. The exhibition presents work made between the 1960s and the present, allowing the comingling of art created in different decades to provide new ways of understanding the current moment and imagining the future.

Across the museum’s three floors—and in an energetic series of live programmes and screenings—the exhibition features fifteen newly commissioned presentations, performances, and events, furthering MOCA’s commitment to supporting artists in the development of new work and ideas. Thinking through the formation and designation of the Greater Toronto Area, GTA24 considers the arbitrary lines drawn to create maps, the ambiguities of an ever-widening geographic designation, and the precarity that arises for those displaced by rapid growth and expansion. These conditions create a state of otherness, and GTA24 reflects on the artistic strategies of working with, on, and against dominant cultural forms. Within this context, the exhibition emphasizes the crucial roles artistic language plays in developing more sustainable and caring ways of living together, and in building solidarity.

Frieze

Toronto Star

Carriers (Gravity-Fed)
Mold-Blown Glass (Husky ® 5 Gal. Latch and Stack Tote), Waterjet Cut 304 Stainless Steel, Museum Glass, CNC Carved Salvaged Hand Polished Fossil Black Marble, White Marble, Sunet Red Marble and Red Onyx, Aqua-Resin®, Waterjet Cut Stained Glass, Various Commercial Signage Offcuts, Gowanus Canal Sediment (including: polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls, mercury, lead, copper, coal tar, desulfobacterales, pseudomonas putida etc...), Bio-Pure®, Mars® Bar Wrappers, Dial® Omega Moisture Glycerin Soap, Advil® Extra Strength Pain Relief, Betty Crocker®, Steel Bowls, Yankee Candle® Home Sweet Home® Fragrance Spheres, KIND® Healthy Grains Clusters, Nickel-Plated Chains, Q-tips®, Auto Passive Syringe 1ML, Dental Scaler, Little Trees® Car Fresheners. KIT KAT® Wrapper, Found Expired Lottery Tickets.