The kitchen is a site of quiet transactions, where care is enacted through labor. Objects facilitate these gestures, absorbing the traces of touch until they are too worn, too stained, too inconvenient to keep. The moment passes, the offering is taken, and what remains is discarded without ceremony. Stripped of their function, they exist in a tension between preservation and disposal, memory and neglect. Reshaped and distorted, they refuse to settle into usefulness or disappearance. Their forms linger in an uneasy state, neither wholly present nor entirely gone—suspended between the tenderness of past service and the inevitability of abandonment.
At Your Convenience interrogates the shifting value of objects and the unseen labor embedded within them. Through acts of transformation, the works expose the fragility of care—how it is extended, received, and ultimately withdrawn. What remains is not just what is forgotten, butwhat refuses to be erased.
Anran Guo
Anran Guo is a queer female artist and art educator currently based in Hamilton and Toronto. She grew up in China and came to Canada in 2014. Guo holds a Master of Visual Studies in Studio Art and an HBA in Art and Art History (a joint program with Sheridan College) from the University of Toronto.
Guo is primarily focused on sculptures and installations. Her works are metaphorical and playful, offer layered readings in critiques of social and political systems. By utilizing everyday objects, Guo creates low-barrier conversations and calls upon the viewers to question invisible power dynamics at play in society.
Guo’s work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, Hamilton Artist Inc., Centre[3], and the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, among others. Her practice is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.