Rebuild. Reshape. Reimagine.

Step 1. See the reality you're in, eyes peeled open, the receptacle ready to absorb. Look into the abyss and see what stares back. Accept that darkness lives there.

Step 2. Lift your head out of those tarred waters. Breathe and feel refreshed. How cold it felt on your skin, but now it prickles with possibility. How everything can change in a second. 

Step 3. Run. Do not be deterred. Not by the darkness of those waters, the pain in your hands or the bigness of what you’re running into. Despite it all you must still

Rebuild. Reshape. Reimagine. 

These tenets are at the core of why we make art and these three artists exemplify them. What they have made is hopeful, a sure and strong footstep in the direction to somewhere. 

Somewhere that feels a little better. 

Gemma Stevens, Laetishia Dorvil, and Madison Strizic. Each of their pieces are sculptural in nature, all places you can walk into and visit for a while. 

In Gemma’s work, From Beneath, Towards Silence, it’s as if a child walked by and as they passed, their imagination materialized: shapes, growth, tiny friends. It feels safe here. Dense, it’s been growing for a long while but also arrived spontaneously, - unfolded unexpectedly in front of you, a place you hadn't dared dream existed, but quietly believed might just be possible. 

In LFCD’s work, The Garden, you encounter these spectacular, delicate, little things and their all encompassing shadows. A gathering, an army, a congregation. A garden. The flowers, in a way,  severed from each other - not of the same earth, but floating above it. They are here to discuss something very important. Sentient little things. Lifeless little things. Their bodies huge on the wall. I’ve never visited a garden quite like this. 

Then there is Madison's piece, Untitled [table]. Woven lattice. 4 slivers of a pie. Smells of hearth, of home, of mom, and of apples. It is of course also a table - perhaps the hearth’s centre where conversations are held - about all sorts of things, about no things. And it is empty until we inhabit it. Think of the life we infuse into things, what we imagine they become when we centre them. A circle. It is a circle. 

Rebuild; It takes time.

“It's a labour of love. That's for sure. You have to love it to do it.” (Stevens) 

“It was a lot of work, a lot of hours, a lot of late nights.” (Strizic)

“The criteria was 100 hours of work. I would spend everyday after I got back from school on it” (Dorvil) 

I like thinking about this time spent working and being with the material. Laetishia up late in bed cutting plastic water bottles. How their bits buried themselves into her blankets, pillows, and skin. Madison weaving forever. I imagine her fingers raw from the reed. Gemma in the forest for hours on end, nose deep in the decay - searching. Harvesting the clay herself, the earth under her fingernails. All of them, slowly, methodically, and without deterring, building and rebuilding.

Reshape; There is something that needs to be changed

Something yearns for a new form. Figuring out what that is, happens before you can build anything. What is the shape of it right now? What do you want the shape of it to become? These are the building plans, finding the parts of the foundations that will need to be torn down, which can stay, and what will take their place.  

Staring at a water bottle on her desk, taking it apart in her mind, what Laetishia saw was this wasteful, plastic thing with the potential to tell a story. Marketed as having a ‘thousand uses’, she found it ironic that most plastic has to be thrown out after ‘a single use’. “So what's really 1000 about it? Flowers- now they have 1000 uses. They're used for grieving, for romance, for happy moments, for sad moments. They're used to portray anger, or sympathy. That's 1000 uses” (Dorvil)

Madison works with recipes as methodology to reflect on race, gender, class, and migration. They speak of the unnoticed labor of care and hospitality that we expect from certain demographics. In the art world this extends to the marginalization of craft, curatorial and administrative work -“but that work is a gift. The table is functionless without its community holding it up, and so I like this idea of having an object for future meals, happenings, and interactions” (Strizic)

It was the shape of her grief that Gemma needed to change. It was new and she was lonely, lost. We don’t talk about death enough. Our fears. What we believe in after. If we could, maybe it wouldn’t be so lonely, “especially for the people that are left” (Stevens) While the piece was born in this darkness, it walked out of it and found its place in the light. “Looking at the ecosystem and these processes within it - to look at something that was bigger than me - was a way to decenter myself and focus on something that could bring hope” (Stevens). Gemma does not feel alone when she stands amongst the life and death she made.  

The first artist asks what we can do for the world, the second - for each other, and the last - for ourselves. But really, each benefits all. 

Reimagine; forever

“I feel like it's ever growing and ever expanding.” (Strizic) 

On the plans for the garden “I never got rid of these notes. I keep them for a rainy day in case I ever get the opportunity to make it bigger.” (Dorvil)

“I could probably work on this forever, just keep it growing and growing and growing.” (Stevens) 

Reimagine. An act that permeates every part of the process, all that came before and all that comes after. The invisible, universe dust that floats around, that we breathe in, gets stuck beneath our fingernails. It infiltrates our minds, our dreams, our bodies. It is the means by which we place our grain of sand upon humanity's sprawling beaches. It comes before and it lives beyond us, what springs from us inspires in some way another and ensures the chain’s unbreakability. The work is not done because the imagination never is. 

They felt the darkness, and the daunting undertaking of their Sisyphean tasks. They felt the cold water, the prickle of possibility and ran. Despite it all they  

Reshaped

Rebuilt 

Reimagined

A garden. Flowers that never die made out of the thing that kills them.

A table. One that doesn’t hold you, but that you have to hold. 

Death. A forest where you never feel lonely. 

When Zoe Heffring (she/her) was 5 she thought she was going to be a figure skating veterinarian. As implied by the name, she would do these things simultaneously, treating sick pets to premium care and adoring audiences to awe inspiring performances. But Zoë did not become a figure skating veterinarian. She became an artist. Now, finishing her third year in scenography, she's learning to build worlds and tell stories. Her work is based in design, music, writing and performance. 5 year old Zoë had a little something right, as her aspirations today are to find innovative ways to combine those disciplines to create a new path forward. Her work aims to explore the nature of our humanity and how it interacts endlessly with the infinite things around it- to be super specific. She’s inspired by accidental chance encounters, serendipity, coincidences, conversations, and the palpable, potential energy that exists in everything around us…and also the idea of doing a triple axel while vaccinating a puppy.