Introduction
For GTA24, Lotus L. Kang’s new site-specific sculptural installation commissioned for GTA24 took the form of a 13-foot greenhouse. Within the greenhouse, the artist gathered a variety of material objects including lotus shells, cast elements in aluminum, tatami mattresses, and elements made of silicone and fabric, creating a somber space for reflection.
Lotus L. Kang (b. Toronto, Ontario) works with sculpture, photography, and site-responsive installation. Known for sprawling installations and a distinctive material repertoire, Kang’s practice is a dialogue with the impermanent and the in-between. Elegantly disordered and richly layered, her site-sensitive works explore the relational bonds between time, personal history, and cultural knowledge. Rather than taking a prescriptive or reiterative approach, her practice is one of regurgitation. She seeks to disrupt a human-centred perspective of the world with a broad curiosity for life and matter. Kang holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. Her work has been exhibited at Chisenhale Gallery (London), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Deborah Schamoni (Munich), Franz Kaka (Toronto), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Hessel Museum of Art (Annandale-on-Hudson), Mercer Union (Toronto), New Museum (New York), Sculpture Center (New York), Remai Modern (Saskatoon), Oakville Galleries, and Cue Art Foundation (New York). Kang lives and works in Brooklyn.
Greater Toronto Art 2024 (GTA24) is the second edition of MOCA Toronto’s recurring triennial exhibition, which was conceived in 2021 to look more closely and consistently at artistic practices with a connection to the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Featuring a constellation of twenty-five intergenerational artists, duos, and collectives, GTA24 looks back as much as it looks forward. The exhibition presents work made between the 1960s and the present, allowing the comingling of art created in different decades to provide new ways of understanding the current moment and imagining the future.
Across the museum’s three floors—and in an energetic series of live programmes and screenings—the exhibition features fifteen newly commissioned presentations, performances, and events, furthering MOCA’s commitment to supporting artists in the development of new work and ideas. Thinking through the formation and designation of the Greater Toronto Area, GTA24 considers the arbitrary lines drawn to create maps, the ambiguities of an ever-widening geographic designation, and the precarity that arises for those displaced by rapid growth and expansion. These conditions create a state of otherness, and GTA24 reflects on the artistic strategies of working with, on, and against dominant cultural forms. Within this context, the exhibition emphasizes the crucial roles artistic language plays in developing more sustainable and caring ways of living together, and in building solidarity.