Special Projects at Art Toronto 2022

Joseph Tisiga is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal and a member of the Kaska Dena First Nation. Tisiga is the recipient of The Yukon Art Prize (2021), the Sobey Art Award (2020), and the REVEAL Indigenous Art Award (2017). His work reflects upon notions of identity and what contributes to this construct—community, nationality, family, history, location, real and imagined memories. 

Joseph Tisiga maintains a multidisciplinary practice that is rooted in painting and drawing, but also draws from performance, photography, sculpture, and installation. For the 2022 edition of Art Toronto, Tisiga will be presenting a site-specific installation made especially for the fair. 

Sami Tsang (b. 1997 Windsor, ON, Canada) uses clay, rice paper, and drawing to materialize internal questions and traumas. Tsang studied traditional Chinese painting for seven years, followed by the ceramics program at Sheridan College, where she was introduced to the broader clay community. She was the 2019 recipient of the Gardiner Museum Prize.

At Art Toronto 2022, Cooper Cole Gallery will present 5 new large-scale ceramic sculptures by Sami Tsang. Her works allow her to process domestic and private narratives, specifically her negotiation of Hong Kong, where she grew up, and Western culture.

Rande Cook’s practice currently centres a collective response to the land, which holds the teaching of his forefathers. Contained within his work is the acknowledgement of material extraction and cultural erasure through the activation of traditional forms in new material contexts. In particular, Cook's works call upon a sense of urgency towards the loss of old growth. To this end, he often employs alternative materials such as resin or MDF to highlight the shift of use in cultural practice as a result of such a loss. 

A striking example is The Speaker, in which two masks sit facing one another. They depict the figure of the Speaker, who were usually chiefs carrying the responsibility of upholding land value by mediating communication between the land and its people. One mask is carved from red cedar and the other is cast in resin. Through a material as manufactured as resin, Cook still calls upon the land by integrating natural dyes derived from mycelium, the fungal network of communication connecting trees to each other through their roots. Cook set the dye in the resin using the tonal sounds of Mungo Martin reciting songs and stories. In this way, Mungo Martin’s voice had choreographed the dye particles into the observable formation. 

Sensitive, sensualist and poetic, Paryse Martin’s work dives us into the confines of a world floating between dream and reality. Wonderful beasts and mysterious characters evolve in complex and whimsical universes that exude a strong symbolic and magical charge. Combining drawing, sculpture, installation and animation, her works borrows from craft, folk art, and women’s traditional decorative arts. The adventurous spirit with which she approaches her work emphasizes small gestures, playful strategies and a variety of protocols, adding a dimension of the unexpected. The visitor is invited into a concentrated aesthetic experience that highlights the paradoxes of our existence. Alluding to some of the tensions that belong to our time, Martin’s work echoes the female condition as much as our relationship to nature and to spirituality.