21 WADE AVE #2 | TORONTO

SHEllie Zhang | elemental | 14 sept - 4 nov 2023

Lumber, Cinder, Beam; Topsoil, Mid-Stream

Lumber
"Home" is a recalcitrant dollhouse, a living sense that tails your every last action.
Take stock of the missing element in your home.
For lack of water, enjoy a cold bubble bath.
For lack of fire, let the fumes rise from candle and Ovaltine.
For lack of earth, plant a monkey puzzle tree in the middle of it.
For lack of wood, straighten your spine and bark at the furniture
For lack of metal, let the handymen plume about your room in fishnet lacquers.
Filial cannibalism, or: how we put each other out of our miseries when blood ties bind us all the way through.
The arrangement of objects in space offers its support to your heroic journey homebound, as if what can always be transformed is the same as peace with one's own fate.

Cinder
Stale water has a flavour the nose picks up, even when it's been in constant circulation. I have become a thin beam of gratitude that seeks an empty beach. A pearl on a conch shell presumes that beauty flourishes best in sheer numbers, so beauty on top of beauty is never wasted. One is most likely to locate energetic blockages: in the joints of the hands and feet; in the corners of rooms; in the neglected valves of the heart-mind, littered with scars where impossibility has left its mark.

Love is the balancing act between integrity (self) and relinquishment (other). Love interlaces contradictions but leaves the fingers soft enough to let light through. In other words, flow by itself is not enough; stagnancy persists even when everything appears to be in circuit. Nine ghosts draw sabers versus nine ghosts’ hanging swords.

How do we drain the swamp that mires itself in our blood and bile? I should follow the lead of the dragonfly, whose two pairs of wings scissor through the wind with just enough effort to keep the body aloft. They move at such a natural speed the movement remains unseen. I scoop one up in my jar and make it symbolise the beauty of effortless action, the dragonfly’s exactitude of flux; I robe myself up in their lowland drone; finally I furrow my brow at the thought of “beauty” and float away.

Beam
Grandma and I are on the mountainside, leaning against a railing. Lushan behind us is faded to a foggy outline; more distinct are the two trees that frame the photo. I’ve come bedecked, a look of consternation on my face, a snarl of fake gems in the shape of a tiger on my tee. The light of the supreme is blinding up there so I’m squinting, green frills on my sleeves and memory imprinting. My laolao clips a visitor’s guide to her button-down cotton shirt. A brochure is a euphemism for the attempted control of perception, I whisper in rebellious mutter. When I take a photo of the photograph, the glare from the flash renders a second sun.

Topsoil
The receded, the subtle, the formless.
Chaotic Blob goes to market and finds
a mirror that captures cumulonimbus –
a cursed monkey’s paw arranged
in a display with flowers tucked
behind ears – a lady in waiting
for the end of the world. Tacit
nod of the chin, parting of the mountains
for a moment like clouds.
Chaotic Blob changes behind a silken screen, another
skin over the primordial void, throws a thong
over the translucent divider. To not drill holes
in unity; to leave no smear upon totality.

Mid-Stream
The kind of truth that demands silence most easily falls prey to cliché. Strange how cliché is silence's next door neighbour, as if it should be surprising that a thing and its opposite are adjacent.

In my mind clatters a massive buffet of stroke objects: black bean sauce on rice noodles; fortune cats that lever their right arms up and down; har gow with their see-through wrappers; a painted-over pair of yin-yang symbols murmurs through the top coat; assorted-flavored jell–Os with coconut cream inside; the words “crab rangoon” as though they designated food.

Is all truth silent by nature; that is, destroyed by speech, even destroyed by thought? Yet, for some reason, it’s 2am and I’m outside a store that hasn’t shut its lights off yet. A neon mountainscape pinballs a thin stream of water through its rugged plastic surfaces. I press my nose to the window and I’m struck by a sense of the sublime, as though a channel back to the Lushan of my youth improbably opened up. Truth in the facade, the simulacra, the cheap imitator. There’s a primordial immanence that precedes the elements that I’m learning now how to surf, my feet aloft on industrial waste bricks, my palms open as if in parting.

- Fan Wu

Shellie Zhang (b. 1991, Beijing, China) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. By uniting both past and present iconography with the techniques of mass communication, language and sign, Zhang explores the contexts and construction of a multicultural society by disassembling approaches to tradition, gender, history, migration and popular culture. She creates images, objects and projects in a wide range of media to explore how integration, diversity and assimilation is implemented and negotiated, and how manifestations of these ideas relate to lived experiences. Zhang is interested in how culture is learned and sustained, and how the objects and iconographies of culture are remembered and preserved. 

Zhang has exhibited at venues including WORKJAM (Beijing), Asian Art Initiative (Philadelphia) and the Museum Anchorage (Alaska). She is a recipient of grants such as the Toronto Arts Council’s Visual Projects grant, the Ontario Arts Council’s Visual Artists Creation Grant and the Canada Council’s Project Grant to Visual Artists. She is a member of EMILIA-AMALIA, an intergenerational feminist reading and writing group. In 2017, She was an Artist-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario. In 2021, she was a recipient of the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Award. Her work is in public collections such as the Robert McLaughlin Gallery and the McMaster Museum of Art. Her work has been published in Canadian Art, the Toronto Star, Blackflash Magazine, CBC Arts, and C Magazine. Recent and upcoming projects include exhibitions at The Bentway (Toronto), Capture Photography Festival (Vancouver), and the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego.

Fan Wu is a suspended creature who savours the edges of things. He is currently thinking-feeling his way through the Zhuangzi and how art can be a site for the practice of "care without attachment". You can find his work online at Shrapnel Magazine, C Magazine, and The Ex-Puritan.

….SELECTED PRESS..COUVERTURE MÉDIATIQUE....

 

The artist would like to acknowledge and thank the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Superframe Framing Fund.