Our sky is constantly in flux: from dawn to dusk, ancient to future. Shaping Atmospheres traces the arc of humanity’s enduring relationship to the Sun and our planet’s nebulous environment.  

As our relationship to the Sun is physical and cyclical, so is the exhibition, revolving around an immersive looping film program. In medias res, the exhibition opens with the soundscape of a solar eclipse, enwrapping the listener in a moment of darkness before the first light of the Sun breaks the cosmic stillness. Harkening back to when these occurrences were powerful celestial events, the proceeding video returns to ancient Iranian Mithraic practices when sun worship was perhaps forged as a response to an ecological disaster over 4,000 years ago. 

Such history can be seen as the beginning of a long lineage of ideology that attempts to harness the productive powers of the Sun as well as mitigate its destructive potential: from the birth of monotheistic religions, through mystical teachings and socialist revolutions. Today, spiritual traditions are sublimated into technological forces driving a solar economy. Instead of evil spirits descending from the sky, we are now concerned with solar storms and heat waves. Our reality inverts: we fear the life-supporting sun, the Amazon emits more carbon than it stores. After millennia of terraforming across continents, the divide between natural and artificial evaporates. Terraforming shifts into aeroforming. The 20th century, shaped by total war (gas warfare) and system’s theory (weather modelling), has in turn propelled the 21st century’s drive towards geoengineering the atmosphere. What are the dangers and potentials of such extreme interventions? Have we faced such challenges before? The cycle closes with a meditative video of a volcano, the mythical Mount Ararat, shrouded in passing clouds. Fade to black. We enter the stillness once again of a solar eclipse. 

A series of objects frames the film cycle with a historical progression of empirical methods measuring the forces enacting upon our atmosphere: a hygrometer based on a human hair (1700s), a handblown glass pyranometer (c.1800), a high-altitude meteorological balloon (c.1900) and a live satellite feed of the burning star at the centre of our solar system (20th C.).

Artists:  

Saodat Ismailova 

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg 

Pallavi Paul 

Forensic Architecture 

Richard Mosse 

Noémie Goudal 

Bill Fontana 

Charles Stankievech  

Ala Roushan  

Jean-Pierre Aubé 

Priyageetha Dia 

Common Accounts 

E.A.T. Experiments in Art & Technology 

Haseeb Ahmed 

Ivy Lee 

The Shaping Atmospheres Exhibition is curated by Ala Roushan (OCAD University) and Charles Stankievech (Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto) with support from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

A parallel symposium (November 7-8) brings together technical, social-political, and philosophical perspectives to speculate on the future of our planetary environment, specifically addressing the implications of our solar economy and proposals for solar geoengineering. 

Image credits: 1) Saodat Ismailova, Melted into the Sun (2024); 2) Shaping Atmospheres, Installation View (with Ivy Lee). Slideshow: 3) Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies (2020-2022); 4) Richard Mosse, Broken Spectre (2023); 5) Pallavi Paul, Garam Havaa (2024); 6) Jean-Pierre Aubé, 31 Suns (Dawn Chorus) (2010).

In conjunction with their upcoming publication, In Depth: Urban Domesticities Today, SO – IL founders Jing Liu and Florian Idenburg will give the Gehry Chair Lecture on September 12.

Before the lecture begins in Main Hall, join us for the Exhibition Opening of Urban Domesticity in the Larry Wayne Richards Gallery from 5:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. The exhibition will highlight SO – IL's inventive approach to domestic spaces. 

To mark National Indigenous History Month in June 2024, the Daniels Faculty will launch Reconciliation Reflections: Six Student Projects—a temporary installation of student work from two graduate studios developed in response to Wecheehetowin ‘Answering the Call’ University of Toronto–Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) Calls to Action.  
 
The installation features projects from Architecture Studio 2: Site, Matter, Ecology, and Indigenous Storywork and Landscape Architecture Studio 2: Land(scape) and Memory—both studios aim to be concrete responses to Call 17 to integrate Indigenous curriculum content. 

The six projects on view from the Master of Architecture and Master of Landscape Architecture programs were selected by the Daniels Faculty’s First Peoples Leadership Advisory Group: Amos Key Jr., Trina Moyan and Dorothy Peters.

Reconciliation Reflections will be on view in the Historic Stairwell Gallery to honour National Indigenous Peoples Day on June 21. The exhibition will remain through September for the National Month for Truth and Reconciliation and November for Treaties Recognition Week and Louis Riel Day. 

Architecture Studio 2: Site, Matter, Ecology, and Indigenous Storywork 

Architecture Studio 2 considers the concept of site and landscape as an action in reconciliation, ecology as a study in relationships that define inhabitation, and Indigenous storywork as a method of research and design-work. 

With Crawford Lake as their site, students were asked to design a museum for Indigenous art that builds on the knowledge they gained through workshops and guest lectures on Indigenous cultural competency, ways of being, ways of knowledge, Indigenous cultural and design practices.

The four works on display in Reconciliation Reflections are group projects for the assignment "The Artifact and The Room," which involved the consideration of five contemporary artworks.

ARC1012 Studio Coordinator: Behnaz Assadi; Instructors: Chloe Town, Anne-Marie Armstrong, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco, Brian Boigon, Aleris Rodgers, Julia Di Castri. The syllabus for this studio was initially developed by Adrian Phiffer and James Bird (Knowledge Keeper of the Dënësųłinë́ and Nêhiyawak Nations and Residential School Survivor).

Landscape Studio 2: Land(scape) and Memory 

Landscape Studio 2 introduces concepts, terminology, and design research tools for academic and professional work that requires attentiveness to cultural and political history, history telling, cultural practices, community engagement, multi-cultural collaborations, as well as the creation of spaces for ongoing public participation, dialogue, stewardship, shared governance, and civic expression.

The two works on display in Reconciliation Reflections were developed thorough engagement in three design research explorations: 1) Memory, Healing and Cultural Resurgence: Reconstructing the Counter Monument, 2) Land-Based Mapping: Visualizing Environmental Histories and Landscape Changes, and 3) Memory, Land Relations and Indigenous Futurisms: Imagining the University of Toronto as an Indigenous space. 

LAN1012 Instructors: Liat Margolis, Terence Radford 

Project Statements

1. “Resilience” by Issac Valle and Susan Xi (ARC1012) 

The adverse effect of rising land costs has affected and participated in the explicit gentrification of the Indigenous peoples specifically in Vancouver, where Anishinaabe artist, Rebecca Belmore expresses her artwork, The Tower and Tarpaulin. Her art often symbolizes political, economic, and social issues facing Indigenous peoples in Canada. We drew from these socio-political and economic issues and interpreted the architectural envelope to voice the resiliency of Indigenous peoples. These gestures as a parallel between the common narrative of resilience that Indigenous peoples have in the face of adversity, as they continually press-on through past genocide and present dehumanization. Resilience is meant to be felt through the physical, emotional, environmental and intellectual realms through each art piece and the environment that shelters it.” 

2. “Manoomin (The Good Seed): How the Erasure of One Plant Represents a Relentless History of Deprivation” by Claire Leverton (LAN1012) 

“Across Southern Ontario, wild rice or manoomin once grew in abundance. For the Anishinaabeg people every transition of this plant’s life is intrinsic to cultural grounding and sovereignty.  As with the principles of the Honourable Harvest, manoomin harvesting revolves around respect and care for the plant. In the gentle nature that the plant is seeded and harvested, as well as the resources that are left to allow the plant to regain its strength. We have taken sacred gifts from All our Relations and created commodities out of them. As a society we continue to accept the loss of Indigenous peoples’ land- and human rights, including current-day boil water advisories and lack of clean drinking water on reserves. We must remember that Manoomin is only one plant that is deeply entwined with regional landscape management cultural and political systems. Yet its history encompasses century-old and ongoing land dispossession. What more could we find by digging into the histories of just one more plant?” 

3. “Hug” by Abida Rahman and Sammi Ku (ARC1012) 

“Inspired by Michael Belmore’s Somewhere Between the Two States of Matter, this project studies the natural formation of river rocks on how time and water places and shapes them and how they intersect with one another. The tension in the voids between the rocks is the area of interest in this project. Thus, the gallery space in our project is the ‘in-betweenness’ between two rock forms as they hug and embrace. Inherently, collecting and displaying artifacts is a very colonial ideology. This design starts to depart from the colonial discourse, through the close study of the material culture and material treatment of the Anishinaabe peoples.” 

4. Inspired by Walking with Our Sisters by Christi Belcourt
Marly Ibrahim, Christopher Law and Anvi Nagpal (ARC1012) 

“Walking with Our Sisters by Christi Belcourt is an installation art piece that commemorates missing and murdered Indigenous women and children. The sacred circle, which the vamps are organized around, symbolizes infinity, so that the women may never be forgotten, creating an ongoing memorial. With this in mind, our design aims to further amplify this experience through a procession walkway, spanning 10 meters, leading into a circular light frame timber structure that further opens up to a conical oculus. Since the opening of the sacred circle traditionally faces east, where the sun rises, the oculus angles towards east as well.” 

5. Inspired by Ursula Johnson’s Mi’kwite’tmn (Do You Remember)
Denise Akman and Noel Sampson (ARC1012) 

“Ursula Johnson’s Mi’kwite’tmn (Do You Remember) is a work of performance art. The work sees the shaving of ash wood, a wood that is both sacred and culturally significant to the Mi’kmaq First Nations. In her performance, the wood is stripped down into thin ribbons traditionally used within Mi’kmaq basket weaving. Through this, she challenges the prevalent Western-centric approach of archiving Indigenous cultural traditions still active within contemporary practice and placing them within anthropological sections of Western museums and galleries. Our design seeks to elevate both Ursula herself and the tension she works to expose. Populating and inhabiting the rings of a silo-like form gives relevance to the feat of her performance and a lasting space for her to practice and share her work.” 

6. “Seed Keeping and Knowledge Keeping: Storying Seeds through Past, Present and Future Practices” by Georgia Posno and Ram Espino (LAN1012) 

“Many heirloom seeds show their story in their physical form. The wild goose bean is cream coloured with black speckles, the eye of the bean has an orange hue, and if you hold this seed in your hand, you may think that you are reading a book. Seed keepers across Turtle Island have preserved the physical forms of seeds and thus, the stories and sovereignty embedded into them. As we began our project, we knew we wanted to evoke a sense of community and cultural resurgence in our research. So, we became very interested in knowing who the caretakers of the seeds are, and how we can make visible their teachings.” 

Showcasing student work from across the degree programs at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, the End of Year Show encompasses a wide range of projects, reflecting the myriad ways this cohort envisions addressing both the challenges and opportunities of our rapidly changing world.

Produced in our Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Forestry, Urban Design and Visual Studies programs, the drawings, graphics, models and videos on view throughout One Spadina consider our collective matters of concern with an exuberance for innovative digital and physical approaches to the objects and environments we create, nurture and evolve.

The End of Year Show will be on view across all three floors of One Spadina until the end of June. A curated selection will then be on view in the Larry Wayne Richards Gallery and the Commons until early September. 

The exhibition was curated by Office In Search Of (OISO), an interdisciplinary and collaborative design practice founded by Brandon Bergem and Jeffrey Garcia, both sessional lecturers at the Daniels Faculty.

Outer Circle Road is a collection of Toronto landscape photographs by Seth Fluker depicting a city’s energy in constant flux. On view in the Daniels Faculty’s Larry Wayne Richards Gallery, the work exhibited features distinct subject matter exploring the interplay between human activities and seasonal change.

The first photograph, Dufferin Grove Skate Park (2016), extends Fluker’s long-standing interest in skateboarding. This temporary skate spot, which functions as an ice rink in the winter, is scattered with fun boxes, ramps, and flat bars—a setup Fluker would have skated extensively in his youth. 

Photographs from Fluker’s series From The Way appear in the first bay. This body of work examines the snowmelt process in his Toronto neighbourhood, Roncesvalles Village. During his daily walks between mid-January and the end of March 2022, Fluker pointed his camera toward the ground and photographed the ever-changing formations of snowbanks shaped by people and nature. For this installation, he selected two pictures taken days apart in front of his neighbour’s house of frozen and melted water mixed with road salt.

In the second bay are photographs taken on April 29, 2022 of traditional and prescribed burns of High Park’s rare black oak savannah ecosystem. This resilient Toronto landscape, reliant on fire for its nourishment, has withstood over 4,000 years of climate change, insect infestations, invasive plant incursions, and human neglect. Historically, Indigenous people preserved this landscape by setting timely and managed fires to help sustain the ecosystem’s abundance, balance, and vitality. On this pandemic day, Fluker also felt rejuvenated while watching the smoke drift across familiar landscapes and dissipate into the atmosphere.

The exhibition concludes in the third bay with two photographs of waste taken in summer: Surplus Fill Material (Tommy Thompson Park) (2018) and Litter (Michener Court) (2023). This pairing alludes to human activity’s environmental impact and how our behaviours enhance and diminish our surroundings.

The exhibition’s title, Outer Circle Road, references Fluker’s connection to the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus, which he frequently cycles to. Curated by Jeannie Kim, the exhibition is being presented by the Faculty in partnership with CONTACT Photography Festival.

About the artist

Seth Fluker was born in Orillia, raised in Vancouver and now lives in Toronto. These days, as a self-taught photographer and filmmaker, he is predominantly concerned with human attachment to place and the depiction of landscapes and water cycles. Art Metropole, Hassla and New Documents have published books on his photography, which are part of the MoMA, Tate Britain and Yale University libraries. In 2017, CONTACT Photography Festival exhibited Blueberry Hill, a collection of Fluker’s Canadian landscape photographs, on 32 billboards across eight Canadian cities, with the placement of these billboards defying locality, offering viewers visual access to distant and sometimes remote spaces within the country.

The Art Museum at the University of Toronto, in partnership with the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, is pleased to exhibit the graduating projects of the 2024 Master of Visual Studies studio art graduates.

This exhibition is produced as part of the requirements for the MVS degree in Studio Art at the Faculty. It will be on view in the Art Museum at U of T until July 27.

The Art Museum is located in the University of Toronto Art Centre (inside University College) at 15 King’s College Circle.

Among the artists whose work will be exhibited are Sandy Callander, a. portia ehrhardt, Rachel Ormshaw, Adrienne Scott and Cason Sharpe.

An opening reception will be held at the U of T Art Centre between 6:00 and 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday, May 1.

For more information on the exhibition and the featured artists, visit the Art Museum at U of T website by clicking here.

The 2024 Visual Studies Undergraduate Thesis Exhibition, Still there are seeds to be gathered, features the work of 18 individuals across disciplines within the Daniels Faculty's Bachelor of Arts in Visual Studies (BAVS) program.

See the exhibition during the opening reception on Friday, April 12, 6:00-9:00 p.m., or visit during the weekend of April 12-14, 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. at SPACE on King. 

"While this show exhibits the accumulation of thesis research and processes across the Visual Studies program, it also marks the completion of our undergraduate degrees. Taking our proximity to what feels like the end, Still there are seeds to be gathered cherishes the great depth of knowledge we have embodied over the years.

The show title stems from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction—a point of reference for the thematics of generating and holding on to knowledge while entertaining the potential of future relations to arrive. In the early weeks of our thesis course, our class held a discussion of Le Guin’s text. The concluding statement, “Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars,” sparked an unknown feeling that borders the poetics of our completed time in school as well as a rethinking of our projects as ever-changing. As a ‘non’-ending phrase, Le Guin uses it to mark this text as ‘unfinished,’ citing the space for transformation and growth.

In the context of this exhibition, the research each student has taken upon themselves has not reached a ‘conclusion.’ Each thesis project poses a question vital to its artist, one that will continue to be explored beyond the scope of this exhibition."

Excerpt from the exhibition text written by Ella Spitzer-Stephan, Satyam Mistry, Nusha Naziri, Auden Tura, and Olive Wei.
 

Join us for the opening of How to Steal a Country, curated by the Daniels Faculty’s Lukas Pauer. Located in the Larry Wayne Richards Gallery at 1 Spadina Crescent, the exhibition transforms the display space into scenes from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Scale- and life-size dioramas, vignettes and tableaus create an immersive experience, revealing the key role that architecture plays in the ongoing sovereignty dispute. Key invasion scenes employing techniques from theatrical-set model-making establish sovereignty as a performative concept dependent on an audience.

This event is part of the Daniels Faculty’s Winter 2024 Public Program. Pauer will also give a public lecture titled “Recognizing Facts on the Ground: Deconstructing Power in the Built Environment” on March 14 at 6:30 p.m. ET in the Mail Hall of the Daniels Building.

Daniels Faculty Emerging Architect Fellow Lukas Pauer is a licensed architect, urbanist, historian and educator. His Vertical Geopolitics Lab, an investigative practice and think tank at the intersections of architecture, geography, politology and media, is dedicated to exposing intangible systems and hidden agendas within the built environment.

USING TREES AS THEY ARE—an exhibition by Zachary Mollica, Emerging Architect Fellow at the Daniels Faculty—is on view in the Larry Wayne Richards Gallery from December 11, 2023 to February 26, 2024.

Known for projects that demonstrate ways to put together non-linear bits of tree, Mollica has started to apply the same set of tools for close observation to a broader range of materials and their sources.

“This exhibition is about trees and an approach to working with the best properties of their products that I have been refining both intentionally and not, for years. When we build with wood as we do, using just a few species and forms, we directly contribute to an ongoing and pervasive simplification of forest ecosystems around the world. If we could re-diversify the ways we build with wood, we could actively encourage the re-establishment of healthier systems by the act of building.”

Gallery Address
Larry Wayne Richards Gallery
1 Spadina Crescent
Toronto, Ontario
M5S 2J5

Hours of Operation
Monday–Friday: 9:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m.
Saturday and Saturday: Closed

Gallery Address

Architecture and Design Gallery
Daniels Building
1 Spadina Crescent
Toronto, Ontario M5S 2J5

NEW Hours of Operation

Monday: 9:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m.
Tuesday: 9:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m.
Wednesday: 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Thursday: 9:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m.
Friday: 9:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m.
Saturday and Saturday: Closed

ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home is on view in the Architecture and Design Gallery at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design until March 22, 2024.

The Indigenous-led exhibition organized by and first presented at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, was co-curated by Joar Nango (a Norway-based Sámi architect and artist), Taqralik Partridge (Associate Curator, Indigenous Art - Inuit Art Focus, Art Gallery of Ontario), Jocelyn Piirainen (Associate Curator, National Gallery of Canada) and Rafico Ruiz (Associate Director of Research at the CCA).

The exhibition showcases installations by Indigenous designers and artists, reflecting on how Arctic Indigenous communities relate to land and create empowered, self-determined spaces of home and belonging. Through the exhibition, as well as its accompanying publication and programming, ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home aims to have long-term impact, opening new forms of dialogues and ways of thinking about Northern Indigenous practices of designing and building that are not normally considered in the canons of architecture.

Work on view includes Taqralik Partridge and Tiffany Shaw’s The Porch, a transitional space unique to Northern living that welcomes Indigenous visitors into an institutional setting that has historically excluded them. Geronimo Inutiq’s I’m Calling Home presents a commissioned radio broadcast that recalls the central role that radio plays in both connecting Inuit communities and expediting colonialism. Nuna, an installation by asinnajaq (in conversation with Tiffany Shaw), is a tent-like structure that invites both sharing and reflection while evoking the four elements. Offernat (Votive Night) by Carola Grahn and Ingemar Israelsson is an altar featuring a birch burl that evokes the burning of Sámi drums during Christianization in the 1700s.

The exhibition also facilitated the Futurecasting: Indigenous-led Architecture and Design in the Arctic workshop (co-curated Ella den Elzen and Nicole Luke) that brought together nine emerging architectural designers and duojars (craftpeope) to convene across Sapmi and Turtle Island to discuss what the future of design on Indigenous lands might become.

The full list of contributors includes: asinnajaq, Carola Grahn and Ingemar Israelsson, Geronimo Inutiq, Joar Nango, Taqralik Partridge, and Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory. The original exhibition design was by Tiffany Shaw, Edmonton with graphic design by FEED, Montréal.

Land Acknowledgement

We wish to acknowledge this land on which the University of Toronto operates. For thousands of years, it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island, and we are grateful  to have the opportunity to work on this land. The land of 1 Spadina Crescent has been the home and an important trail of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. Spadina is synonymous with Ishpadinaa, meaning “a place on a hill” in Anishinaabe. 

Image credits: 1) The Porch, Taqralik Partridge and Tiffany Shaw. ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Vers chez soi / Towards Home exhibition view, 2023. Photo by Scott Norsworthy. 2)  Nuna, asinnajaq. ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Vers chez soi / Towards Home exhibition view, 2023. Photo by Harry Choi. 3) Offernat (Votive Night) by Carola Grahn and Ingemar Israelsson. ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Vers chez soi / Towards Home exhibition view, 2023. Photo by Scott Norsworthy. 4) I’m Calling Home, Geronimo Inutiq.  ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Vers chez soi / Towards Home exhibition view, 2023. Photo by Scott Norsworthy. 5-6) ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Vers chez soi / Towards Home exhibition opening. Photos by Harry Choi.