Alan Belcher & Steffani Jemison
Patience (E)

[En anglais]

Joys’s most recent iteration of Patience featured Alan Belcher’s and Steffani Jemison’s enchantingly delicate ensemble of sculpture and film. Patience is an ongoing five-month exhibition with eight iterations of artists — one variation for each letter of the word — exploring themes of waiting, absenteeism, and speculation.

Belcher nailed a distorted colour photograph of tree bark to a single six-inch-by-six-inch beam offcut hanging on the exterior wall, foretelling the uncanny forest that filled the gallery. The installation was a continuation of Belcher’s iconic Softwood (Nafta) (2018 – 19) series that recontextualized Canadian softwoods as artworks, allowing him to elude American import fees and challenge economic absurdities. Fifteen samples of softwood beam offcuts spanned the space, with two distinct groupings situated on opposing walls. Colour photographs with varying levels of distortion, carefully folded into individual forms, were neatly nailed to the end grains and edges of each beam. The prints shifted between wood-grain and bark patterns and spanned from muted greys to vibrant purples. The scale of the works was intimate, never protruding more than eight inches from the wall. When Belcher began the softwood series in 1982, he shipped editions to galleries in New York City and Chicago; because they were classified as art, they avoided proposed tariffs and functioned as both performance and sculpture. At Joys, the works lived domestically, shifting their dynamic and altering the narrative. The act of showing the collection in a laneway garage in Toronto, forty years after its inception, became inherently spiteful. In this setting, the series’ probing game of semantics developed a sense of pride in its continuation.