Between Pheasants Contemporary

Exhibition Text

It was complicated because we couldn’t bring many people, and we can’t really say where it was, but we can talk about what that where once was. Disorienting portals that seemingly lead to nowhere, like desperately trying to escape through the smoke as the house burned down.

Sometimes we can only measure time by the way the things around us continue to change – even those seemingly static, fixed entities that we imagine as timeless slowly start to shift. There’s an abandoned house somewhere in Northern Ontario that already feels like it’s from another era, as if this could somehow make it immune to the rabid bits of time that wither away at everything. Yet, returning to this haunt every few years, its continued erosion anchors it as something indeed of this time, changing in and through the slow accumulation of days. 

Sudbury-based artist Sage Turchan’s solo exhibition, Dust Bath, installed in a remote abandoned house, includes three large smoke drawings on canvas, a handful of miniature smoke drawings in welded frames, and one graphite drawing on paper. The large scale pieces are fully covered in cloudy plumes of dusty earthtones, save for small white silhouettes depicting a collection of domestic scenes like doorways, beds, and lamps that float in a disordered schematic across the canvases. Using a similar concept of a cyanotype to produce a “negative” image, Turchan laboriously uses smoke to mark the entirety of their canvases while placing handmade maquettes of domestic objects onto the canvas to prevent exposure to the smoke, leaving a ghostly white negative imprint on the canvases. 

When they were younger, Turchan found themselves trapped and desperately trying to escape from an abandoned house that caught fire somewhere else in Northern Ontario.  With this personal history in mind, we are better equipped to read Turchan’s oeuvres: the disorientation of objects in smoke; doorways like portals that lead to nowhere; and an ashy smoke that swallows the near entirety of these canvases as it did another house. Turchan’s work is like a blueprint of destruction. Many of the objects depicted in Turchan’s pieces found their real-world counterparts in the exhibition space: a lamp resting on a couch, and rooms without halls whose doorways lead to other rooms. Unlike a traditional white cube setting, the rotting farmhouse morphed Turchan’s work into more malleable, transformative experiences, lending to their transitional nature. 

In the late summer of 2024, this work was installed and documented in an abandoned house in a now forested area known vernacularly by but a few as New Toronto. During the Great Depression, many left Toronto, moving Northbound to try their hands at farmsteading. As the economic situation turned around, many returned to the Southern metropolis. The house that held Dust Bath was the last house left standing in this New Toronto area, believed to be abandoned at the turn of the millennium. While its abandonment was much after the outmigration from New Toronto back south to Toronto, this house is the last vestige of a once antimodernist community. Dust Bath, then, is a record of the things we lose to time.