Buried Echoes

OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, January 12, 5-7 pm at Open Studio.

Buried Echoes explores the course of the buried Taddle Creek in today’s Toronto, encouraging looking and listening to what cannot be immediately seen or heard — an obscured piece of nature and indigenous heritage. The practice-based research for this work includes the development of a year-long sensory geography, representing the experience of place. It aims to represent a hidden phenomenon, by capturing the trace of the river on cyanotypes, walking the course of it as an experimental performance, and juxtaposing image and sound to create a mental image. It depicts, not the river but the “absence” of it — to make a sense of longing — for the river and the sense of place it could create. This work represents a present absence; a spatial memory of a lost landscape.

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Marzieh Miri is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist. She was born and raised in Iran and holds an MFA in Documentary Media from Toronto Metropolitan University. Her research and creative practice explore the notions of place, land and environment through photographic mediums. She is especially interested in practice-based and sensorial approaches that explore humans and their environment as a united existence. Winner of Ontario Art Council grants has exhibited her art projects in Iran, France, Austria and Canada. She has also worked as an architect, professor, writer and critic and has published in international journals and presented at conferences and courses in Canada, England and Iran. Her recent book chapter, Elementals: Water, is related to this project. Commissioned by the Center for Humans and Nature in Chicago, IL, this five-volume book will be published in 2024.

Marzieh Miri gratefully acknowledges funding support from the Ontario Arts Council.