Thresholds of Perception
Where image, memory, and agency intersect.
October 23 - 26, 2025
28 Industrial St. Unit 222
East York, Toronto
Thresholds of Perception brings together three distinct bodies of work that challenge the limits of seeing, remembering and understanding. Through layered photographic processes, sculptural interventions, and material dislocations, the artists invite viewers to slow, consider, and dwell in newly-articulated visual spaces: those between clarity and distortion, presence and erasure, perception and revelation.Together, these works navigate and give form to interstitial zones-where image, body, memory and agency intersect. Thresholds of Perception asks not just what we see, but how we move through experiences of vision, and under what critical conditions.
Shelagh Howard’s The Secret Keepers traces the hidden terrain of intimate partner abuse through an intentionally arduous, seven-stage process. Integrating long exposures, tintypes, and silver prints, the work holds and mirrors cycles that index those of abuse and survival. What remains visible is as important as what is lost—each obliteration and trace reflecting the erosion and reclamation of self.
In Simulacrum, time becomes elastic. Freestanding wet plate and plexiglass sculptures combine human forms, objects, and scenes in both positive and negative, allowing viewers to move through, around, and within moments, perceptually constructing new ones. Rejecting the “decisive moment,” the work opens a multiplicity of timelines where perception folds into perspective and back again.
Simulacrum
In Distorted Flesh, Sally Buck commits contested botanicals to layered refractions using water, glass, and lenses. Foregrounding the body as both a site of pleasure and a subject of political forces, the project takes its cue from feminist phenomenology. The resulting glitchy imagery—born of light rather than code—resists prescribed objectivity, offering instead a deeply subjective and sensorial field of vision.
Distorted Flesh
The Artists
Events
Opening Night
An evening of art and music, wine and cheese. Live jazz by the Riverdalians and the artists in attendance.Thursday October 23, 2025 6-9 pm
Looking to See Workshop
Sally Buck leads a guided discovery of three featured artworks, using deep looking to reveal new ways of seeing and understanding.Participants will slow their gaze and engage the senses, examining forms and their design within each piece.See how perception deepens our understanding of artistic decisions, and transforms the meanings we make of photographs.Saturday October 25, 2025 1 - 2:30 pm
Artist Talk & Panel Discussion
Artist talk and panel discussion with guest moderators Sonja Schar and Kelly Kyle, co-founders of Akasha Art Projects.
Known for their curatorial expertise and innovative contributions to Toronto's art and design community, they will guide an engaging conversation with the exhibiting artists.Sunday October 26, 2025 1 - 2:30 pm
Thresholds of Perception
| Opening Night | Thursday, October 23, 2025 | 6-9 pm |
| Gallery Viewing | Friday, October 24, 2025 | 12-5 pm |
| Looking To See Workshop | Saturday, October 25. 2025 | 1-2:30 pm |
| Gallery Viewing | Saturday, October 25, 2025 | 12-5 pm |
| Artist Talk & Panel Discussion | Sunday, October 26, 2025 | 1-2:30 pm |
| Gallery Viewing | Sunday, October 26, 2025 | 12-5 pm |