Another Small Disturbance: Shannon Garden-Smith at MKG127

A mutual excitement is shared between two people who have encountered a Shannon Garden-Smith work. Vibrant carpets of sand, featuring marbled or herringbone designs, invite the childlike delight of the forbidden—step on the work!—and recounting the experience extends the pleasure. In pieces like Sand Silhouette (2021) or Snail-work (for the lake) (2024), Garden-Smith short-circuits interpretation and moves you straight into sensation: You walk in and the image shifts beneath your feet. These are installations you’re invited to undo as much as make, and the experience feels less like standing before an artwork than stepping inside one. Design, pattern, and color reorganize you.

So I was curious, following a few run-ins with Garden-Smith’s work in group shows, to visit her solo exhibition Dust Jacket, recently on view at MKG127 gallery in Toronto. Citing the veined patterning of book linings from the nineteenth century, Dust Jacket is a show built from surfaces—stone, sand, dust. Across these works, dust sourced from a construction site, for instance, partially obscures an image of sand, with fingerprints drawn into its particles for added affect. Elsewhere, sand bands are digitally scanned into waving curtains that shimmer with your movement, like a hand moving through phosphorescent water.

In this way, Garden-Smith’s material becomes both subject and method. Sand and stone—materials once abundant to the point of banality, now diminishing due to the world’s unsustainable consumption for construction—are treated as agents that carry time, memory, and extraction in their grain. Her surfaces feel lush at first glance—baroque, glimmering—but implicate you in their formation. This dynamic was visible from the first series in the show, Leaf, recueil de cartes I-IV (marbles) (2025), appropriately positioned by the busy storefront window of MKG127, where streetcars and passersby create moving shadows. The digital prints of pigmented sand dust, drawn into pleasing abstract geometries, host a few suspended marbles on their strata, pearlescent and winking. Across the gallery hung a scrappier cousin, Leaf, recueil de cartes IV (dust) (2025), featuring another quartet of digital prints of banded sand but overlaid with dust-covered panes and finger smudges, as though the images had been left exposed to a worksite and then sent to the framers with the dust laid in. It reminded me of David Campany’s 2019 exhibition at Polygon Gallery, A Handful of Dust, reviewed by Erin Silver for this publication. Silver wrote about how dust is “photogenic,” and Garden-Smith seems to be taking this up a notch. Not only is dust photogenic, and not only does it challenge the eye to see past its surface, but it’s an added plane in which to play.

Dust Jacket builds on an already coherent body of work that is iterative, research-driven, and unusually linear. Even a quieter series like Tracks and traces and changes (Sand Prints) (2024), Garden-Smith’s documentation of found sidewalk imprints for the Goldfarb Gallery’s vitrine spaces at York University, returns to surfaces as records, and to pattern as a kind of timekeeper, gathering compression, pressure, and contact. This logic extends to the body of the viewer. In the exhibition’s title installation, a curtain of vertical blinds suspended just off the wall, extending floor to ceiling, was held a few inches into the room and across two walls. Each slat carried a marbled surface of drifting color, so that the image only cohered—and then fell apart—depending on where you stood. A wall-based work can be faced, but a curtain must be approached. It acts as both image and threshold. With the blind moving gently as I walked along its perimeter, I noticed something simultaneously delicate and infrastructural: the domestic inflated to encompass a striated weather system.

Garden-Smith’s influences have long included Victorian-era crafts made from seashells—ornaments built from glimmer and enclosure, made custodial. “To live means to leave traces,” wrote Walter Benjamin of the velvet-lined cases Parisians carried with them at the turn of the century—étuis, little portable interiors designed to hold precious objects close. But Garden-Smith isn’t being precious; her use of seashells feels oriented to the temporal, biomineral, fathomless process that produces them. In Opposite the spine (vitrine) I (2025), for instance, Garden-Smith hangs a vitrine and stacks it to the brim with digital prints that reveal, in their accrual, a shell motif. In this way, Dust Jacket offers a study in how traces heap up: in nacre and dust, in paper linings and oil films, in the surface of things meant to be handled but also preserved. And also in an object like the seashell, a humble but extraordinary home for the mollusk that doubles as nature’s time capsule, the product of a complex process articulated through designs that suggest the divine.

The shifting brilliance of mother-of-pearl—that tough, luminous lining held inside certain shells—shimmers through Garden-Smith’s aesthetic as well, at times risking the saccharine. In Leaf, recueil de cartes IV (dust), beauty accrues through compression and finitude and exaction, each hard-hewn line the product of consideration and the careful application of a rebellious medium, sand. But then a layer of dust on top suggests something’s been disrupted or neglected—fingerprints everywhere. In images that seem to compress and pull away, the works resist didacticism; their extractive associations (indicated, for instance, in the press release) stay atmospheric, registering at the edge of perception like a heat shimmer on the highway. Garden-Smith suggests we look at the work through a petrochemical lens—at how the title installation holds shell, stone, and petroleum in the same historical image-space. And it’s compelling to consider how glimmer can hint at a material abundance that is, in its way, sinister for the extraction that permits its profusion.

These images largely succeed for their formal intelligence—grids, repetition, accumulations that behave like systems. At moments, the show recalled the flattened photographic field of Gerhard Richter’s 128 Details from a Picture (Halifax 1978) (1998)—that cool tabletop horizontality of magnified fragments arranged into a grid. But if Richter’s structure reads as analytical distance (painting turned into evidence), Garden-Smith’s seriality reads as entanglement. Her fragments gather as you remain alongside them. And even when the installation didn’t solicit touch, it kept me aware that looking is a form of contact—that the body is always participating, if only through its small disturbances.

Garden-Smith’s ability to compose atmosphere as symbolic condition, especially her attention to dust, also made me think of Nadia Belerique, whose installations often hold the viewer in a similarly unstable perceptual field. Garden-Smith shares this capacity for building a kind of psychic architecture out of material cues. Your eye is made to hover between background and foreground, and the figures that can appear in that vulnerable mid-range space form the main characters: dust, time, accrual, and waste.

Dust Jacket treated our environmental crisis as a condition rather than a theme, which is, in its own way, a relief. The seduction of surface became a way to hold you close while admitting that ornament has a cost, that archives are not neutral, that beauty can be braided with damage. The collective charge I had formerly associated with Garden-Smith’s sand-room works—their giddy permission, their public undoing—didn’t disappear, then, but dispersed. It drifted into a cooler register, one built from repetition and accumulation: slat after slat, shimmer after shimmer, trace gathering beside trace. If the show was participatory, it was in how our body is slowly recruited into this accumulation—asking us to linger, to adjust, to move along, to feel ourselves become another small disturbance in a field already dense with them.