Town Girls Beneath is a compilation of videos that documents gallery technicians sanding down and painting over a wall work to make room for incoming exhibitions. The photo-based wall transfer being covered is called Town Girls Atop a Hill and depicts women posing – standing and sitting – somewhere on a hilltop in Guyana. The transfer work was part of Brewster’s 2017 thesis exhibition A Trace | Evidence of Time Past at Art Museum at the University of Toronto. For this exhibition she used metaphor, materiality and storytelling to reflect on the transition of home, using her family’s migration from Guyana to Toronto as inspiration. The wall transfer encouraged her to consider an everlasting legacy, that although the image is no longer visible it does not mean that the impact of its presence is no longer there.
Artist Bio
Sandra Brewster
Sandra Brewster is a Canadian visual artist based in Toronto. Her work has been exhibited nationally and abroad. A recipient of the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Prize (2018) and the Gattuso Prize for Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival (2017), Brewster has been recognized for her community-based practice that centers a Black presence located in Canada. The daughter of Guyanese-born parents, she is especially attuned to the experiences of people of Caribbean heritage and their ongoing relationships with back home. She received a Master of Visual Studies degree from the University of Toronto. Brewster is represented by Georgia Scherman Projects.
Documentation by: Yuula Benivolzki