“Meaning, like any entity, does not form in a vacuum.
It grows and pokes out from places we discover with our senses, our discomfort and our stepping into newness.
Likewise, language is a guide formed from and for reciprocal relationships – a builder of common ground, soil from which our vocabulary sprouts.
While words, meaning, and cultures connect and divide, their roots offer something more complex, nuanced, and all-embracing.
One just has to remember.
Our sensitive bodies know this process.
Exploring the unknown and sensitive is a difficult, ambiguous, and awkward encounter, but it affords a space from which we can come out different than we came in.”

Artist Bios:

Sasha Shevchenko is a Ukrainian, Tkaronto/Toronto based multi-disciplinary artist. Inspired by her experience as a Ukrainian immigrant, she bridges interests in sculpture, textile, archaeology, and intimate ethnography.Through contemporary and ancient story-telling methods, Shevchenko creates suggestive installations where tradition, resistance, and identity have the space to whimsically extend into cultural futures.

Evgenia Mikhaylova is an interdisciplinary artist working in installation, video, sound, drawing and performance. Her work examines the ambiguous spaces of meaning-making, communication, language and epistemology through interdisciplinary research-based practice that investigates parallels between the ways we experience the world through our senses and interpret the knowledge we acquire. Her research focuses on the physical and speculative communication eco-systems, and their interrelationships with language and sensory perception. Evgenia holds a BFA from OCAD University, Tkaronto.

Image ID

An overlay of organic textures in brown-greyish colours with small slivers of yellow, orange and red and a feathered milky white right corner of the image. A yellow text in elegant serif typeface left justified reads: “What Has Hardened Will Never Win.”

Documentation by Polina Tief