My Memory Echoes in You

OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, September 11, 6-8pm at Open Studio

The Garden

In another country across an ocean, there is a garden.

Where once I was in the garden, it now exists only within me, in my mind’s eye.  Generations of a single family enjoyed this garden. Tended over lifetimes, a living constant.

Captured through changing technologies, photographs of the garden accumulated as it, and the family, grew and changed: black and white photographs, slide positives, colour prints that have faded in their albums; each somehow ephemeral in its frozen moment.

The garden may be gone now. I don’t know. I don’t expect to visit again.

The Roses

The roses of the garden have heavy, floral, sweet, delicious scents. I want to eat one. I eat one. The taste is sweet, heavy. It fills my mouth and nose, and it lingers.

Rosehips used for jam, tea, and preserves; rose water flavour in Turkish delight. The flavours of my childhood.

My grandmother teaches me to press the flowers: to tilt the heads, flatten the petals and leaves, pull apart the large petals and press them separately. To compose them.

My Memory Echoes in You

I remember the garden clearly, fondly. It is huge; it towers over me. There are many flowers but the roses stand out the most. Pink Ladies… pink and red. I put my head right into the rose bush and inhale deeply.

In the photos, the towering, enveloping rose bush is smaller than I remember. But I too am smaller and as I grew so did they. I don’t know whether the garden still stands. The house does, but the roses? Without anyone to tend them?

My children will never know that rose garden; the garden of my summers, an ocean and a lifetime away. But they know the garden at the end of our street. They put their heads right into the rose bush and inhale deeply.

They will remember the moments, through their own photographs and memories, and my roses will echo in them too.

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My Memory Echoes in You invites visitors to join the artist in The Garden. The Garden exists only in the artist’s memory: a rose garden of summers gone by, of heady scents, tended by a grandmother, and enjoyed over decades by generations of a single family and their friends.

Memory is fragmented, full of gaps; an involuntary, fleeting recollection. The images it calls forth contain only what is significant to us or what we perceive to be true. Once forgotten, a memory may suddenly surge into the present or slowly coalesce before our eyes; either way, recognition is physical and sensory.

Memory allows us to experience past and present simultaneously. While it may represent a search for truth in what was seen, felt, and experienced, we must also acknowledge that memory can never be fully trusted.

Drawing imagery from the family archive, documenting not only the passage of time but also changing technologies, black-and-white photographs, slide positives, and faded colour prints are juxtaposed with present-day photographs of a different rose garden. The installation brings the garden into the present through a combination of digital and analogue photography, slides and scans, digital print media, and analogue printmaking.

The work considers how memories are inherited, transformed, and carried forward. Through the merging of technologies, images, and generations, past and present meet. Visitors are invited to enter The Garden and bring their own memories of places, people, and experiences into relation with the artist’s.

The sculptural presentation of memory offers a lived experience through bodies, gestures, and shared space. It seeks to create a moment of recognition: that the memory presented through the artwork may find an echo in the viewer’s own memories.

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Dana Tosic is a Toronto-based artist working across printmaking, installation, and digital media. She holds a BFA from Queen’s University and an MFA from the University of Calgary, where she was selected for the Tim Mara Graduate Student Exchange at the Royal College of Art in London, U.K.

Her practice explores embodied perception, memory, and the intersections between digital technologies and traditional printmaking processes. Her research has been presented at the Printopolis International Symposium on Printmaking in Toronto (2010).

Tosic has exhibited and participated in residencies across Canada and internationally, and has taught at the University of Calgary and the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She has been a member of Open Studio since 2003 and served on its Board from 2011–2016. Alongside her artistic practice, she is Principal at Design Workshop Architects and Future Workshop, where she leads public art and interdisciplinary projects, including commissions and presentations at Nuit Blanche Toronto, the Interior Design Show Toronto, and DesignTO.