Featuring works derived from the unique creative practices of Cassils, Suzanne Nacha, Roula Partheniou, and Gordon Shadrach, Works in Practice explores the use of photography and image-making by artists whose practices are centred in the mediums of performance, painting, and sculpture. Using a range of methods, the artists capture photographs at various stages of their process as a means of ideation, translation, and documentation.

Los Angeles and New York-based multidisciplinary artist Cassils employs performance as a form of social sculpture, contemplating histories of 2SLGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle, survival, empowerment, and modes of care. They frequently use photography as a tool to both witness and index the live durational performances that often push the artist’s body to its limits. In their series Human Measure (2022), Cassils intersects contemporary dance with the history of photography through the live development of large-scale cyanotypes, created with light and the performing bodies of non-binary and trans collaborators. In Works in Practice, this cyanotype is contextualized with a series of photographs documenting the work’s choreography and cyanotype exposure during L.A. Pride in 2021—”a moment of intimacy, endurance and touch” after months of isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Toronto-based artist Suzanne Nacha creates idiosyncratic worlds through painting, sculpture, and animation that examine our relationship to geologic and industrial landscapes. Nacha draws on her geological background, creating maps of the earth’s continents and structure to consider human experience’s connection to the physical earth through humour, pathos, and anthropomorphism. Nacha poses and photographs coloured clay sculptures in painted environments to construct elaborate scenes of complex imagined landscapes that are the basis for her painted works. Her photographs translate the varied contours, forms and lines of the three-dimensional into complex two-dimensional landscapes that challenge our perception of form and scale.

Sackville and Toronto-based artist Roula Partheniou employs the replication of inanimate objects as a tool to deconstruct the experience of perception and the vernacular of common objects in contemporary life. Primarily working in sculpture, Partheniou reinterprets the motifs of the still life—an exercise in detaching a humble object from its normal setting in order to translate and describe its essence. In her practice, Partheniou turns the same critical lens to her environment, capturing similarly enigmatic objects in their natural habitat. In Works in Practice, photographs collected from these daily musings are contrasted with photographs of her sculptures, resulting in a series of images containing visual puns, revelling in material play.

Toronto-based artist Gordon Shadrach’s practice uses the tradition of portraiture painting and the semiotics of clothing to disrupt historic and contemporary depictions of Black people in art and culture. For his project Dis/Mantle (2022–23), Shadrach employs an afrofuturist narrative to re-imagine the early 20th century mansion Spadina House, animating it with his portraits of leading contemporary cultural figures alongside multidisciplinary works by other artists of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. In Works in Practice, photographs taken as reference for Shadrach’s paintings capture his portrait subjects at play and leisure in the lush gardens of Spadina House. These are contrasted with portrait photographs from his series Trade (2019), in which Shadrach uses the dress of contemporary basketball jerseys and the historic uniform of Black Loyalists to confront systems of power that utilize Black bodies for capital gain.

Although none of the four artists identify primarily as photographers, photography plays an essential part in each of their creative practices. For some, photography has become part of a daily practice, analogous to the act of drawing. Revealed in Works in Practice are the artists’ sources of inspiration from the world around them, their relationship with their collaborators, and their processes for world and language-building.

• Gordon Shadrach
• Roula Partheniou
• Suzanne Nacha
• Cassils