Gabi Dao
geetha thurairajah

soothsay
01.15–02.12.2022
Room 1

Some time in the recent past, we flew on planes. From the past into the future, from the here into the there. We once hugged and touched everything; we ate with our hands; we sang loudly and laughed with our mouths cranked all the way open. We watched movies full of contagions that were not our contagions. We never thought a thing about bats, or snakes, or cats. We quit, but were not laid off; we felt differently towards money. We tried not to worry about statues or cops in the city.

But all this was before what happened next. Before backwards-looking became more or less counterproductive, flawed. What does it mean to make art in this moment? What beliefs do we honour or exploit for our survival?

Gabi describes, in conversation, being out of work at the height of the pandemic and scouring barren grocery store shelves for materials that might be useful for sculptures. No toilet paper or all-purpose flour to be found—only flypaper, limp fruit, and heaps and heaps of tapioca starch. From the abundance of tapioca starch she makes a waxy, fruit-leather “quitting work” coat embedded with decaying dandelions and dirt; elsewhere, makeshift shrines are resurrected from unspooling flypaper, incense, and fake fruit, the latter cast out of a fleshy, glycerine-and-makeup concoction typically used in the movie industry to create fake wounds. Counteracting the popular conception of the bat as a carrier of disease, these shrines to the bat gods instead seek to reclaim the creature as a symbol of immunity and ecological interconnection.

geetha’s paintings, meanwhile, turn a shrewd eye to the belief systems that continue to underpin our changing definitions of individual and world. Set in jewel-toned golds, blues, and mauves, the stars of these paintings include enigmatic laughing Buddhas, phallic zoomed-in Hieronymus Bosch blooms, kitsch garden-décor-genre suns and moons, and regal aliens traversing metaphysical archways. In this way, the artist’s use of a wild array of symbols (and imposter symbols) in uncanny palettes provokes disturbing new reorderings of the universe. In some of these reorderings, her paintings seem to suggest, irony might even trade as highly as any genuine struggle to understand.

soothsay is an exhibition about what happens when the recent past collides with these new spiritual and material conditions. Supposing that something new, and newly strange, is possible after all, working without and against a readymade history.

– Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross

The artists would like to thank Unit 17, Christian Vistan, Jacquie Ross, Eric Lowe and the Canada Council for the Arts.