The Shell Projects

Speaking Across the Divide - Abedar Kamgari
August 4-28, 2022

Opening Reception: August 4, 7:00-9:00pm
Performance 1: August 6, 2:00pm
Performance 2: August 10, 7:00pm

When I was eight years old, my father wrote a play foreseeing mother and I’s imminent emigration. An immigrant father goes to visit his young child but the mother is not home, and so father and child have an exchange from either side of a locked door.

The artworks in Speaking Across the Divide are inspired by this fictional story as well as its parallels in baba and I's experiences as a father and child living with geographical, cultural, linguistic, generational, and gendered distances. I reimagine objects from the set of the play—a lone door in the foreground and a long curtain in the background—as manifestations of the context and conditions of displacement and diaspora. Through performative and material explorations, I place these symbolic objects into conversations with a range of poetic, archeological, and linguistic threads to reflect on distances both personal and global.

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Abedar Kamgari is an emerging artist, curator, and arts worker based in Hamilton and Toronto. In her art practice, Abedar considers the contexts and conditions of displacement and diaspora using site-responsive, performative, and relational approaches. Her current projects explore diasporic archives, familial inheritances, and the idea of distance, inspired by a play written by her father and garments passed down from her grandmothers. Abedar received a BFA in Studio Art from McMaster University in 2016 and has performed, screened, and exhibited in a range of institutional contexts since. She is completing an MFA at OCAD University.

A Passage - Pejvak

Shell - 13 Mansfield Ave (back alley)
Nov 3 - Dec 3, 2021

shell is thrilled to announce its final exhibition of the year featuring the work of Pejvak!

A Passage (2018) is a two channel work that depicts Agarak’s theatre with the local children’s choir announcing the major embarkation points on the former Yerevan-Baku railroad on one screen, as horsemen travel through the now-defunct rail tunnel on the other. The work explores the state of the Armenian southern border in the midst of the construction of an industrial Free Economic Zone and simultaneous abandonment and destruction of a historical trans-national railway. A Passage addresses the multiple historical, financial, and socio-political pressures that the land has and continues to be subject to in the service of capital in Armenia, as well as both Russia and Iran, and across Asia more broadly.

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Pejvak (PJVK) is the long-term collaboration between Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari. Through their multivalent, intuitive approach to research and living they find themselves in a convergence and entanglement with likeminded collaborators, histories and various geographies.

Rouzbeh Akhbari is an artist working in video installation and film. His practice is research-driven and usually exists at the intersections of political economy, critical architecture and planning. Through a delicate examination of the violences and intimacies that occur at the boundaries of lived experience and constructed histories, Akhbari uncovers the minutiae of power that organizes and regiments the world around us.

Felix Kalmenson is an artist whose practice navigates installation, video and performance. Kalmenson’s work variably narrates the liminal space of a researcher’s and artist’s encounter with landscape and archive. By bearing witness to everyday life, and hardening the more fragile vestiges of private and collective histories through their work, Kalmenson gives themselves away to the cadence of a poem, always in flux.

A Vague Memory
by Véronique Sunatori

*QueenSpecific
787 Queen Street West
June 14 - July 23, 2021

the shell projects is really happy to present A Vague Memory, a window exhibition by Véronique Sunatori at *QueenSpecifc.

We remember seeing Véro’s work in 2018 at the terrific exhibition Forward Motion at the Small Arms Building in Mississauga like it was yesterday. Looking down at her attentively arranged sculptures, thinking about how the delicacy with which Sunatori works echoes the fragility of the details on the natural world that she depicts, we knew that her practice had tremendous potential for our little Queen Street window. Working together since 2019, we’ve taken our time supporting a work that’s been central to the artists’ developing practice.

The composition at *Queenspecific consists of 360 ceramic tiles that make up miniature vignettes of various natural landscapes Sunatori has visited in the recent past. As the landscapes from Toronto, Niagara, Osaka, Gaspésie, and Gatineau intertwine with each other, signs and symbols appear sparingly, hinting to the natural elements found in those places. As the city settles into another concrete summer, we spend hot sunny days meandering through alleyways, parks and smelling the neighborhood flowers. Stuck in the metropolis, Sunatori’s work brings us out into where we’d like to be, places we’ve been, and places we may someday go.

Véronique Sunatori is a multidisciplinary visual artist living and working in Toronto, Canada. Sunatori has participated in residencies at AIRY Yamanashi (Japan) and the Société d’art et d’histoire de Beauport (Québec). She is the recipient of a Research and Creation grant for emerging artists from the Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Québec and an Individual Visual Artist grant from the Toronto Art Council. Sunatori’s work has been presented at Art Mûr, FOFA Gallery, Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), Small Arms Inspection Building, CIRCA Art Actuel, TAP Montreal and Durham Art Gallery. With her artist collective XVK, the group has performed and exhibited at the BIG on Bloor Festival, Y+ Contemporary, Martin Goya Business, Idea Exchange, Long Winter and at Flux Factory in NYC. Sunatori holds an MFA in Visual Art from York University (2018).

Fire
by Srijon Chowdhury

*QueenSpecific
787 Queen Street West
March 22 - April 30, 2021

the shell projects is excited to present Fire, a window exhibition by Srijon Chowdhury at *QueenSpecifc.

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We’ve been following Chowdhury’s work for many years–in person, starting at his exhibition at Roberta Pelan in 2017 and through to his presence at Art Toronto and digitally, by admiring his curatorial project Chicken Coop Contemporary in Portland, OR.

Fire is an image made from parts of Chowdhury's Revelation Theater inspired by the Book of Revelation. The momentous works came at a time where Chowdhury sought to explore how to have hope in times of cataclysmic change. This investigation and thematic is obviously relevant now as Toronto hits it’s one year anniversary of pandemic life. Yet, the ominous imagery of Fire is also somehow a relief, a moment of respite from the work of moving towards a future. It is a rich, totalising landscape that in this troubled present allows us to momentarily be.

Our vinyl exhibitions are a way to sustainably finance the presentation of international artists’ work.

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Srijon Chowdhury (Dhaka, Bangladesh, 1987) lives and works in Portland, OR. He holds a BFA from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, MN, and an MFA from the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA.