Toronto-based artist Sandra Brewster presents an iteration of her project Token|Contemporary Ongoing. During a six-month residency at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Brewster was struck by the care and detailed cataloguing processes involved in the maintenance of the AGO collection. Motivated by a desire to bestow a similar level of attentiveness to “non-Western” objects, Brewster reached out to friends and colleagues of the Caribbean diaspora to learn about the value that they assigned to objects from their personal collections that spoke to their cultural backgrounds, and to document the stories associated with particular belongings.

For the exhibition at Or Gallery, Brewster presents images of these items both as photographs and as gel transfers mounted directly onto the gallery walls. These images are accompanied by audio recordings of their owners’ stories and several examples of the actual objects themselves.

The term token, as it is used in the exhibition title, is multivalent. It alludes to the ability of particular objects to become a “visible or tangible representation of a feeling”: a memento, keepsake, reminder, emblem, etc. For a generation of Caribbean folk (including Brewster’s Guyanese parents) who left their homes overseas in the 1960s to purse a “better life” in Canada, objects from “home” become an anchor to a time and place. The continued stewardship of these objects by their current owners provides a way of extending temporal pasts and locations into a present space and moment.

The Or Gallery acknowledges its presence on unceded xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) territories.