Art Windsor-Essex respectfully acknowledges that we are located on Anishinaabe Territory – the traditional territory of the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, comprised of the Ojibway, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi. Today the Anishinaabe of the Three Fires Confederacy are represented by Bkejwanong. We want to state our respect for the ancestral and ongoing authority of Walpole Island First Nation over its Territory.
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Sasha Opeiko: pixel / dust
October 24, 2023 - March 3, 2024
Second Floor
Sasha Opeiko. by constant flow all things are thinned, 2022. Found objects, video, media devices, photo prints. Dimensions variable.
Sasha Opeiko’s research practice explores the breakdown of the digital image (and all other things with it) under capitalism, reflecting on the afterlife of images in a post-capitalist world. At once intricate and restrained, her work is concerned with the ways in which the political is articulated through moving images, and how the digital image, in turn, is both a response to – and the result of – the economic system in which it exists.
pixel / dust brings together a series of works where the pixel, the building block of the digital image, is highlighted front and center, with faulty 3D scans that glitch in real-time, and computer-generated montages of empty spaces and ruins, haunted by absence. These moving-image works are accompanied by decaying household objects, suggesting that there is no escaping the corrosion that capitalism has caused (or perhaps, the corrosion that capitalism has been masking).
At the core of the exhibition is the tension that exists between an object and its reproduction; between what we see and what the camera registers; between the image and the image of the image. The works presented here are burdened by their own three-dimensional reproductions. Deeply flawed yet strangely poetic, these renderings seem to have a life of their own. Though by no means a faithful portrayal of the objects they are meant to capture, these simulated copies are an urgent reminder of the glitches and cracks that plague the world we inhabit.
This exhibition forms part of Below the 6, a series of exhibitions that focuses on artists based in Southwestern Ontario whose practices are socially and politically minded.
Below the 6 is curated by TD Curatorial Fellow Muriel N. Kahwagi and is generously supported by TD Bank Group.
About the artist: Sasha Opeiko
Sasha Opeiko is an artist currently based in London, ON. Her work explores intersections of artistic production, machine-oriented ontology, and new definitions of melancholy to explore the “dark” reality of objects in the context of late capitalism. She works in a variety of media including painting, video, installation and new media, using appropriation and remediation of found objects and fragments of visual culture. She holds a BFA from University of Windsor (2009) and an MFA from University of Victoria (2012). She is currently a PhD candidate in the Art and Visual Culture program at Western University. Her work has been exhibited widely at galleries such as Artcite Inc., Thames Art Gallery, and Art Gallery of Peterborough and Manifest Gallery (Cincinnati, OH). She is a recipient of several grants, such as the Canada Council for the Arts Project Grant to Visual Artists (2015), the Ontario Arts Council’s Visual Artists: Emerging Grant (2016) and Visual Artists Creation Projects Grant (2019).
About the curator: Muriel N. Kahwagi
Muriel N. Kahwagi is a writer and cultural worker, working primarily across publishing and programming. Her research is centered on the politics of collecting and archiving the performative; and the act of listening as a form of preservation in and of itself. She is currently the TD Curatorial Fellow at Art Windsor-Essex, and a programmer at the Toronto Arab Film Festival.
