Installation view of Structural Integrity curated by Noa Bronstein and featuring artists Christine Howard Sandoval, Caroline Monnet, and Erdem Taşdelen. Courtesy of the artists. Photos by Blaine Campbell.
CHRISTINE HOWARD SANDOVAL, CAROLINE MONNET, ERDEM TAŞDELEN
Structural Integrity | Main Gallery
27 JANUARY 2024 - 20 APRIL 2024
Structural Integrity gathers together artworks that contextualize the built form through its social textures. Assemblages by Christine Howard Sandoval, Erdem Taşdelen and Caroline Monnet encourage multiple inquiries and call into question the dominant value proposition assigned to specific private and public spaces, while resisting or referencing architecture’s slippage into colonial logics and pursuits. Shared between these layered and complex works is an architecture that moves beyond spatial reasoning towards deeper considerations for the narratives that support multi-vocal understandings of space and place.
Curated by Noa Bronstein. Structural Integrity is co-produced by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin and the MacLaren Art Centre.
A Structural Integrity publication is forthcoming in 2024.
Noa Bronstein is a curator and writer based in Toronto, whose practice is often focused on the social production of space and thinking through how artists disrupt and subvert systems including those registering across social, political and economic structures.
Noa has previously stewarded two leading artist-run centres through her role as the Executive Director of Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography and Gallery TPW. In 2018, in her position as Senior Curator at the City of Mississauga, she oversaw the opening of the Small Arms Inspection Building with programming by local and international artists, including Diane Borsato, Stephanie Comilang, Amy Malbeuf, Dawit L. Petros and Kara Springer, and partnerships with the Peel Aboriginal Network and the Toronto Biennial of Art, amongst many others. Noa has curated and programmed projects/exhibitions at institutions across Canada, including at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Contemporary Calgary, The Rooms (St. John’s), Doris McCarthy Gallery (Toronto) and The New Gallery (Calgary). Her writing has appeared in publications including Artforum, Border Crossings, C Magazine, Canadian Art, esse art + opinions and The Journal of Curatorial Studies. Noa is currently the Assistant Director of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.
Christine Howard Sandoval is a multidisciplinary artist who questions the boundaries of representation, access, and habitation, where what is held in the land and what is held within state-sponsored archives negotiate shared spaces of meaning. Howard Sandoval's work has exhibited nationally and internationally including: The 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennial (Seoul, South Korea), The Museum of Contemporary Art, University of São Paulo (Brazil), The Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver, BC), Oregon Contemporary (Portland, OR), The Museum of Capitalism (Oakland, CA), Designtransfer, Universität der Künste Berlin (Berlin, Germany), El Museo Del Barrio (New York City, NY), and Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens, NY).
Howard Sandoval's work has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at the ICA San Diego (2021) and Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College (2019), during which time she was the Mellon Artist in Residence at Colorado College. Howard Sandoval has been awarded numerous residencies including: UBC Okanagan, Indigenous Art Intensive program (Kelowna, BC), ICA San Diego (Encinitas, CA), Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe, NM), Triangle Arts Association (New York City, NY). Howard Sandoval is represented in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, The San Jose Museum of Art, The San Diego Museum of Art, and the private research collection of Indigenous art at Forge Projects (Taghkanic, NY), and is represented by parrasch heijnen (Los Angeles, CA). She currently lives in the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam First Nations and is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Art in at Emily Carr University (Vancouver, BC). Howard Sandoval is an enrolled member of the Chalon Nation in Bakersfield, CA.
Born to an Anishinaabe mother and a French father, Caroline Monnet is from Outaouais, Québec, and now based in Montréal. After studying at the University of Ottawa and the University of Granada, in Spain, she pursued a career in visual arts and film. Her work is regularly presented internationally and can be found in prestigious museum, private, and corporate collections. Monnet has become known for minimalist yet emotionally charged work that uses industrial materials and combines the vocabulary of popular and traditional visual cultures with the tropes of modernist abstraction to create unique hybrid forms. She is represented by Blouin-Division Gallery.
Erdem Taşdelen is a Turkish-Canadian artist who currently lives and works in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. Through the use of diverse materials and media, he constructs semi-fictional narratives that incorporate unique historical figures, events and texts to implicate contemporary sociopolitical realities. Selected exhibitions include The Power Plant (Toronto); Aga Khan Museum, Toronto (2023); BüroSarıgedik, Istanbul; The Plumb, Toronto; Richmond Art Gallery; Art Gallery of Burlington (2022); Mercer Union, Toronto; Oakville Galleries (2021); Blackwood Gallery, Mississauga; AKA artist-run, Saskatoon (2020); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; The Bows, Calgary; Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen (2019); VOX, Montréal; Bonington Gallery, Nottingham (2018); Pera Museum, Istanbul; Framer Framed, Amsterdam; Or Gallery, Vancouver (2017); Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg (2016); Sabancı Museum, Istanbul (2015). Taşdelen’s work has been reviewed in publications including Artforum, Flash Art, ArtAsiaPacific, Canadian Art and C Magazine. He has been an artist-in- residence at the Delfina Foundation, London; Rupert, Vilnius; and KulturKontakt Austria, Vienna. In 2019, he was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award.
We acknowledge the support of the City of Lethbridge, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.