Site specific installation at Collision Gallery , Toronto

Metal shelving, polypropylene bottles, theatre lights, lighting stands, soap, detergent, water, dye, rubber gloves, Tyvek suits, goggles, gas mask, HD video with sound (00:04:10 loop)

Originally conceived as a companion piece to a now-lost autofiction film, Correspondent Missing expands on fragments and themes from the film’s production, continuing the artist’s ongoing research into conspiracy cultures, digital loneliness, and the vertigo of contemporary capitalism.

The film, titled REDFIELD, told the story of a fictional artist’s descent into depression and alienation as they obsessed over a series of anonymous messages they had been receiving, involving cryptic images of chemical laboratories, colourful product demonstrations, and industrial accidents. The film traced the artists’ futile attempts to identify a conspiracy or plot undergirding the messages, and their fantasy of revealing this conspiracy by exposing it in an art gallery. Two weeks before this exhibition’s opening, the film was lost to water damage.

Reckoning with the film’s absence, Correspondent Missing transfigures REDFIELD’s narrative psychodrama as a physical environment, reframing the closed cinematic space as a vacant film or theatre set. Laboratory, warehouse, and studio dissolve into a quiet mise-en-scene, meditating on the conflicted act of meaning-making, whether aesthetic or political.