Curatorial Statement
DRIFT
DRIFT offers encounters with the city that highlight the consistency of urban space as fluid and poetic, a “terrain vague” with room to explore the familiar and fantastic, the informal and uncanny within new urban forms. The artists featured in the exhibition transform architecture and landscape in ways that highlight the expansive entropy of such spaces, and the blend of memory, history and imagination that converges in our everyday experiences. Among glass towers and concrete surfaces, other histories and rhythms emerge in the constellation of installations – glimpses of subterranean depths, illusory forms, natural histories, and ancient memories – revealing the tentative and speculative texture within even the most resilient and tenacious of city surfaces.
Stretching time and space, each work reimagines the bigger project of the city, and the way it shapes social experience. Exploring spectres of the landscape that emerge through the intersection of space and imagination, DRIFT draws attention beyond formal spaces to suggest the consistency of the city as at once real and intangible, planned and poetic, modern and age-old.
— Shauna McCabe
To encourage involvement by a wide range of artists – established and emerging – each exhibition includes projects selected by the curators through an open call process.
Curator Biography
Shauna McCabe is a curator, writer, and arts manager. Currently Executive Director of the Textile Museum of Canada, she had held the Canada Research Chair in Critical Theory in the Interpretation of Culture since 2007. She held positions as Director, The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery and Senior Curator, Confederation Centre Art Gallery. She has produced over 50 exhibitions of Canadian and international artists, most recently Rural Readymade (2011), Krimiseries (2010), Dig Up My Heart: Artistic Practice in the Field (2010), Formerly Exit Five: Portable Monuments to Recent History (2010).