Installation view of Indelible at General Hardware Contemporary, 2022

Indelible

General Hardware Contemporary
March 19 - April 30, 2022

text by Alex Bowron
photos by Toni Hafkenscheid


Stanzie would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Superframe Framing Fund.

Installation view of Indelible at General Hardware Contemporary, 2022

Parents (After Bonnard), 2021, ink on watercolour paper, 22.5 x 30 inches

Mother and Child, 2021, ink on watercolour paper, 13 x 10 inches.

Phragmites, 2021, ink on watercolour paper, 22.5 x 30 inches. 

Moths to Light, 2021, ink on watercolour paper, 30 x 22.5 inches.

Pillars, 2022, ink on watercolour paper, 19 x 15.5 inches. 

Installation view of Indelible at General Hardware Contemporary, 2022

A Gathering, 2021-2022, ink on watercolour paper, 41.5 x 88.5 inches. 

Our Eye and Mind, 2021, ink on watercolour paper, 22.5 x 30 inches

For Reid, 2021, ink on watercolour paper, 15 x 11 inches. 

Parents, 2021, ink on watercolour paper, 15 x 11 inches. 

A World Apart (After Bonnard), 2021, ink on watercolour paper, 45 x 60 inches. 

Someday Golden Sun, 2022, ink on watercolour paper, 22.5 x 30 inches.

Installation view of Indelible at General Hardware Contemporary, 2022

Installation view of Indelible at General Hardware Contemporary, 2022

Three Figures, 2021, ink on watercolour paper, 13 x 10 inches. 

To The Moon, 2022, ink on watercolour paper, 30 x 22.5 inches. 

Merged, 2022, ink on watercolour paper, 19 x 15.5 inches.

Installation view of Indelible at General Hardware Contemporary, 2022

Installation view of Indelible at General Hardware Contemporary, 2022

Installation view of Indelible at General Hardware Contemporary, 2022

Stanzie Tooth: Indelible

Writing by Alex Bowron


The works in Indelible conceptualize some of the most poetic and contradictory conditions of motherhood. Taking their lead from Tooth’s first-hand experience as a new mother in apocalyptic times, these images depict a complicated entanglement of love, anxiety, loss, and expectation. With a cautious approach to contemporary romanticism, Tooth positions her flattened and partially dissolving bodies in an awkward relationship to their comparatively ornate surroundings. This clumsy affiliation with space is fraught with a disorienting and immersive perspective that mimics the turmoil of growing, birthing, and raising a baby. Holding fast to a cellular kind of love, Tooth toys with nostalgia but ultimately rejects its oversimplification. The dream-like quality of these moments is more of a nightmare; a vitality dulled by the cruel imposition of immense responsibility and an infinitely ferocious fatigue. In these portraits of motherhood, death is looming – the death of sleep, of self, of solitude. As mothers we are loneliest in our realization that we will never again be truly alone.


In Tooth’s world, love is a complex relationship that develops over time and space. Steeped in the smothering beauty of nature, the love of a newborn is in the relentless ambush of tiny hands – kneading skin, nails digging in, leaving marks, mouth latching furiously, draining, warming, calling, haunting. In this world of the most intimate and mutual angst, life is broken down into intervals of interdependent flesh. The new mother’s role is both surprisingly routine and spectacularly alien. It is an alarmingly demanding, high-context performance of normality. While the rest of the world celebrates the arrival of this bundle of joy, the new mother quietly mourns the loss of a solitary existence where she didn’t have something so goddamn precious to lose. The cruelty of having to play out such an astronomical shift of one’s identity in real time is embodied by the distinct confusion of Tooth’s compositions. For every imaginable reason, time has become an incomprehensible abstract. Years might inevitably fly by, but months pass slowly, weeks are unbearably long, days blend together, and minutes move at the pace of continental drift. Facing such an impossible time and still finding meaning there, can only be read as an endearing characteristic of unconditional love.

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