During a month-long artist residency in San José, Costa Rica, Shannon Garden-Smith explored how everyday surfaces can shape artistic research and studio practice.
Garden-Smith, a PhD student in Visual Arts at York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design (AMPD), completed the residency this past May with satis.FACTORY, an independent arts space.
While there, she connected with local artists, visited galleries and museums, and began developing new work rooted in the materials and rhythms of the city.
“The month-long residency with satis.FACTORY was an opportunity to deepen relationships with the artistic community in San José, Costa Rica, which I was briefly introduced to last year during York’s Global Eco-Arts Residency course,” says Garden-Smith. “I was also there to conduct research and produce a new body of drawings and sculptural reliefs.”
After moving through San José by bicycle, Shannon Garden-Smith and La Bici Escuela participants returned to the studio to create work shaped by the city’s surfaces.
Connecting art, cycling and community in San José
A central part of the residency was Garden-Smith’s collaboration with La Bici Escuela, a San José organization that supports bike riding and community engagement.
Together, Garden-Smith and La Bici Escuela led a workshop that brought together cycling, local knowledge and artistic methods of “drawing through touch.”
“We activated ways of sensing and moving through the city differently than might ordinarily be possible by creating rubbed drawings and clay impressions of city surfaces,” says Garden-Smith.
Participants moved through San José by bicycle, stopping at different sites to learn about the history of the city’s material surfaces, infrastructure and built environment.
The group returned to create a collective sculptural relief in clay using their bikes. Garden-Smith later transformed the textured clay surface into a set of rubbed drawings, turning the impressions left by bicycle tires into an ornamental pattern.
She describes the result as “a bit like a street-sized textile.”
The final works from the collaboration, along with other drawings and clay impressions produced during the residency, were shared during an open studio event at satis.FACTORY at the end of the month.
Studio practice and research
As one of the first artists in residence at satis.FACTORY from outside the region, Garden-Smith says it was important to take time to understand the rhythms of San José and the materials that shape the city.
“For the last few years, I’ve been investigating how the materials that make up our cities hold complex histories and imbalanced power geometries,” says Garden-Smith.
“My focus during the residency was therefore on the tire, or specifically rubber, which is a material that came to be industrially produced in the nineteenth century after the colonial plundering of seeds and the establishment of plantation systems to grow rubber plants.”
Her process in San José was shaped by slow observation, repeated movement through the city and conversations with the people she met there.
“In my practice, I often proceed through slow, repetitive processes of attunement, seeking to notice or move through the city in ways that gently point to and resist normative ideologies around time, movement and attention,” says Garden-Smith.
Working with La Bici Escuela and connecting with artists and community members also helped guide her attention in the studio.
“Getting to work with La Bici Escuela and connecting with so many incredibly smart, accomplished and generous people in the artistic community and beyond helped me to guide my attention and to be surprised by how this shifted what I was doing in the studio,” she says.
“It’s funny how talking about the sidewalk, such a seemingly banal surface, opened onto so many tender and energized conversations about the shape of relations in the city.”
Open studio exhibition that marked the close of Shannon Garden-Smith’s one-month artist residency.
About Shannon Garden-Smith
Garden-Smith is based in Tkaronto/Toronto and is currently completing her PhD in Visual Art at AMPD, York University. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including projects at The Goldfarb Gallery, Nuit Blanche Toronto, Centre Clark, Patel Brown, The Bows, Oxygen Art Centre, Gallery TPW and The Institute for Endotic Research in Berlin.
Learn more about Shannon’s work at shannongardensmith.com.
Photos by Alvaro Arroyo and Pablo Murillo.