Garden Variety
2021-ongoing
Shannon Garden-Smith, SK Maston, Alison Postma, Callum Schuster, Michelle Foran, Emily Grace Harrison, Jamie-Lynn Steele, Jonah Strub, Marli Davis, Derek Liddington, Sarah Zanchetta, Leeay Aikawa, Danan Lake, Joy Wong, Emma Welch, Jaime McCuaig
Garden Variety emerged in response to a gap in Toronto’s cultural infrastructure: there are few opportunities for artists to create temporary, materially experimental, public-facing work without institutional mediation or commercial expectation. By hosting exhibitions in a backyard, the project offers a deliberately informal, low-stakes space where artists can work responsively with time, weather, and site conditions rarely available in traditional galleries.
In this moment, when public funding is shrinking, project space is disappearing, and the art world increasingly demands visibility over process, Garden Variety insists on slowness, smallness, and ephemerality as values. It creates space for artworks that aren’t preserved, purchased, or archived, but instead unfold and disappear in shared time. That temporariness is not a loss—it’s an offering: a way to experience art that aligns with seasonal change, ecological logic, and the textures of daily life in this city.
Garden Variety Vol. IV exhibition documentation by LF Documentation