Nabil Azab & Shannon Garden-Smith
Presence in a past or an undetermined future.

Dust covers the exhibition, in a good way. Microscopic particles float in the light as the sun shines through the gallery’s floor-to-ceiling window. A fine powder drifts about and settles on the sculptural forms that are Shannon Garden-Smith’s Blinds II (2023). Nearby, Nabil Azab’s dust-containing abstract photographs radiate in sooty light and shadow. Presence in a past or an undetermined future. occupies the Special Projects Gallery (next to the main space) at Toronto’s Onsite Gallery. In the exhibition text, the curator, Avalon Mott, writes that the artworks endeavour to “hold a moment of presence by calling on what came before it and giving space to think of what will come after.” Mott goes on to note that they draw observers into an act of prolonged looking and toward a space of contemplation. The fuzzy film that (physically and conceptually) coats the exhibition perhaps best summons the presence that Mott seeks to conjure. The dust was there before, it is there now, and it will be there after.

Dust can result from destruction, fomenting histories of conflict and violence. Azab’s Untitled series (2023) engages with a photograph of destruction from the Archive of Modern Conflict. The source image portrays the demolition of a statue of a French developer (perhaps Ferdinand de Lesseps, the engineer) of the Suez Canal. The exhibition text informs us that Azab’s great-grandfather migrated from Palestine to Egypt to work on construction of the canal; shortly after he arrived, the Egyptian government nationalized the waterway, backed by the military; this ignited an invasion of Egypt by Britain, France, and Israel. Instead of the statue, Azab zeros in on the plumes of dusty smoke and debris resulting from its toppling. Across his manipulated and collaged images, he draws drifting, gestural marks. The compositions are greyscale and grainy. Opposite this series, Azab’s vinyl-printed photographic image January 1, 2021 (2024) spans the entire wall. The artwork references a photograph that he stumbled upon by chance (in the snow) on New Year’s Day 2021. The abstracted reworking of the cast-off image (traced to North Africa, further highlighting Azab’s ancestry) calls attention to scratches and light marks. The photograph pulses with light and shadow. Warm blacks set off saturated hues of fiery orange, red, and yellow. The grainy surface evokes a dust-ridden negative. With these images, Azab pays tribute to and interprets significant moments in his family’s history through artistic alterations in the present.