[Winter 2025]
Lullaby of Birdlands
by Earl Miller
Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto
2.05.2024 — 8.06.2024
[EXCERPT]
Formally, Toronto-based artist Sandra Brewster’s exhibition centred on the analogue photographic process of gel transfer. Conceptually, Brewster explored intersecting geographies, migration, histories, and everyday experience.
Black portraiture, often undertaken in public spaces, linked the exhibited works, as did the use of photo-based gel transfer. Brewster began using this technique, which involves transferring a photograph to another surface with ink, early in her career. The process results in unpredictable ink transfers and tears and creases in the gel, which are stressed because the empty spaces created do not hold the ink. Brewster rides with this randomness, further crumpling the paper, creating an illusion of wear – hence, antiquity. She even rearranges sections of the original image. Collaged rectangles form grids, a minimalist foundation for a surface bubbling with expression and action. These layers of surface imperfections, grid structures, and human figures imply meanings beyond standard portraiture. Brewster finds that the gel transfer process alludes to movement between places – transference – or human migration, including her family’s immigration to Toronto from Guyana.
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: Sandra Brewster, Lullaby of Birdlands]
Earl Miller is an independent art writer and editor residing in Toronto who has published regionally, nationally, and internationally.