FrameWork 3/25

Yan Wen Chang on Sandra Meigs

Hardly anything has ever been mentioned of the former inmate who painted the mural of the now demolished Pudu Prison.
Yesterday, the walls that once held the regal paintings of vivid scenes from an ex-convict's captive imagination of jungles and streams came tumbling down to make way for a wider road. ...

FrameWork 2/25

Colin Miner on Beckon

Wax, wick, flame.
Materials are gathered. Wax melts to form the base. Heated and warmed to slowly flow and fill. Surrounding the wick. Nice and snug. Air is displaced in response. Upwards towards verticality. Wait. Time to rest. A coagulation is occurring. We hope you feel it. A growing solidity. Then focused. A flame. Something so soft. It burns.

FrameWork 12/24

Claire Greenshaw on Ian Carr-Harris

Pre-collapse cultural life:
Art Writing, “Toronto” 2020s

Note on this document:

This is a copy of the original paper from 2024, with updated footnotes from transcribe Xerox in 2096, and added commentary from transcribe Shanzhai at the time of this repro in 2168.

The remnants of the original are in the ancient section of the Reading Hand, in the fonds of Starter 1.

FrameWork 11/24

Simi Kang on Beth Stuart

Dear Beth, from a distance & with the buzzing in my ears, too

Or: if our hearts must shatter, at least they have good company

FrameWork 9/24

Dylan Macaulay on Brian Groombridge

TIME AND MATERIALS

Time and materials is a standard phrase in a contract for construction, product development or any other piece of work in which the employer agrees to pay the contractor based upon the time spent by the contractor's employees and subcontractors to perform the work, and for materials used in the construction (plus the contractor's mark up on the materials used), no matter how much work is required to complete construction. ...

FrameWork 6/24

Ashley Culver on Leaking Logic

Ten Things that Make a House a Home

1. Friends know where to drape their coats when visiting.
2. Cooking eggs, I am familiar with how my body fits into the architecture so when I reach for a flipper to poke the yolk it is a dance of ease.

...

FrameWork 5/24

Blair Swann on Derek Sullivan

Drapery of seeds, furniture of husks,
the layers of knots – a library –
gathered at the pace of our walking.

This feeling – of being scattered –
holding a brittle fossil still of bark or bone –
a yet-upturned rock, waiting, sacred.

...

FrameWork 4/24

Ella Spitzer-Stephan on Plural

The definition of a mixture is;

a product of mixing: Combination: such as

A: a portion of matter consisting of two or more components in varying proportions that retain their own properties.
B: a fabric woven of variously colored threads.
...

FrameWork 3/24

Lodoe Laura on Zinnia Naqvi and Althea Thauberger

One of the first jobs I worked when I moved to Toronto was at the CN Tower. Ostensibly, I had moved to the city to go to University, but really, I mostly just wanted to leave the smaller city I came from, where the well-known joke was that everything shuts down at 6 pm – after the government workers went home. As a young adult living on my own, I was excited by the lights and buzz of the big city, and everything felt new. There was an energy about this place, and, to me, the CN Tower was the most recognizable symbol of the city. I felt excited to work at a place so impressive and iconic.
...

FrameWork 2/24

Yasmin Nurming-Por on Gareth Long

Notes on how to be alluring

A lenticular print is, at its most basic, a form of dense compression. With semi-circle lenses like serpentine undulations, light ricochets off their surfaces into the pupils of each viewer. No two people experience the identical image. Our eyes catch a flicker before it disperses and dissolves into another which can lead to a vicious cycle of chasing the original encounter. Taking form from material, Gareth’s watery lenticulars–of Fogo Island and the Delaware River–are visual phantoms.
...

FrameWork 12/23/2

Masi Oliveria on To pluck eternity ...

Here I am, deep in the cyber jungles of Google, stalking artists for Patrick Cruz’s group exhibit in Canada. I dive in and search the first name on the list, clicking through images like a woman possessed, reading texts with the enthusiasm of a caffeine-fueled detective hot on the trail of a crime scene, or I should say, art scene.
...

FrameWork 12/23/1

Bianca Weeko Martin on Patrick Cruz

Inn On The Park

When my parents and I first immigrated to Canada, the first place we lived was a hotel called Inn On The Park: a soft landing on a small hill, on the threshold of Scarborough and Toronto. We stayed here for a few weeks before moving to an apartment at Kennedy and Eglinton. There is now a condo tower at the site of the now-demolished hotel, sharing the same address as that first “home” of ours: Inn On The Park Drive.
...

FrameWork 11/23

Ana Ghookassian on Kevin Yates

Walking through the front door at Susan Hobbs, I’m faced with an absence of colour, yet somehow presented with an abundance of life. The sizable figures, floating in their deserted Vantablack 3.0 worlds, though captured in a helpless state often with their eyes closed and palms open, are clearly still alive. Perhaps this is thanks to our shared contextual knowledge of the ‘Damsel in Distress’ tropes and our innate familiarity with that subtext from a once overused crescendo in pop-culture.
...

FrameWork 9/23/2

Weiyi Chang on Liz Magor

Eclipse

She left on a Tuesday. What was she wearing? It doesn’t really matter. It was raining. Plump, tired drops collided into the windows, cutting wide wet welts through the condensation. Water puddled on the ledge, seeping between the frame and the flaky paint. The house was poorly sealed. All manner of things managed to worm their way through the cracks.

FrameWork 9/23/1

Anna Daliza on Jeremy Laing

In the first known version of an unreleased song called My Forever by SOPHIE, the lyric, “Everybody’s got to own their body” repeats endlessly on top of a pulsing bass and ethereal synth rising with momentum, until the words lose their meaning, or transcend it. This phenomenon, when a word or phrase is repeated so many times its sound is divorced from its meaning, is called semantic satiation. Quite literally, the uncreation of meaning.

A Viewing Room v.4

For our presentation at Art Toronto 2019, we collaborated with Klaus, on a continuation of our project series entitled A Viewing Room, in which we investigate the relationship between design and art; how design and domestic objects interact alongside artworks and how one can highlight the other. Please visit the website www.aviewingroomv4.com