Art toronto 2025
This year I had the honor of being represented at the auspicious Art Toronto by two galleries: Smokestack Gallery and Lustre Gallery.
Like the year before, Smokestack Gallery presented a project produced in collaboration with the gallery’s owner and printer, Jonathan. Creating the artwork was done much in the same method that I usually work in. For the image Winter, I started months before the shoot date collecting all the items that are arranged on the table surface in the image. I was not able to find the fresh-water mussel shells on my own so I contacted an ecologist through the iNaturalist app who studies the waterways in Ontario and had a vast collection of shells. The names of these mollusks, so integral to the health of our fresh water as filter feeders, are really fun: alewife floater, purple wartyback, snuffbox, fatmucket, fawnsfoot. Lovely, right? Mussels are dependant on fresh water fish for reproduction and a food source for muskrats. This is why you will also see a fish and a muskrat skull in the arrangement. The perch is from Lake Erie and the little silver box & silver pen knife from my maternal grandmother. The flowers are sourced from a farmer who uses the back and front yards of her neighbors in downtown Toronto to grow the flowers. This image is hyper-local and a reflection of how all of us are tied into the natural systems that flow around us. This project was conceptualized, items collected and arranged by myself in my bedroom studio using only natural light.
Once everything was assembled in my home studio, The image was captured with use of advanced digital imaging technology. I worked with Smokestack’s Digital Printmaker/Co-founder, Jonathan Groeneweg. Using a Phase One IQ4, he was able to take multiple images of the still-life arrangement at minutely varying focus points and “stack” them using digital software. By this technical mastery, all vantage areas of the piece have been captured in hyper clarity.
The background was painted by Nancy Friedland from photographs that I took of local farmland. Printed at a 60 inches on the long side, framed with museum glass at SuperFrame, Winter stole the show at Art Toronto.
In the Lustre booth, the gallery presented a new size for one of my most popular tondos. Circle Study #9 Hellebore & Blue Eggs at 48” across with a beautiful custom brass frame.
This arrangement was made in 2018 in the same studio that I photograph all artwork using natural light, locally grown flowers, chicken eggs sourced from my sister’s farm and little blue and white teacups inherited from my maternal grandmother.
Winter presented by Smokestack Studio a Art Toronto 2025
Circle Study #9 Hellebore & Blue Egg presented by Lustre Gallery at Art Toronto 2025