Garrett Lockhart

The World Awake

27 June—3 August 2024

South Parade presents The World Awake, a solo exhibition by Garrett Lockhart, the artist’s first in Europe; with an accompanying text by Lily Wang.

Garrett Lockhart is often searching for an expanded, metaphysical sense of home. For their exhibition at South Parade, the artist finds home in the stars, the lit windows of strangers, and a crackling fire. The World Awake presents a collection of sculpture, assemblage, and a video work, utilising the gallery and adjacent room to examine dwelling as an embodied practice of memory, time, and displacement. 

Lockhart shares a new series of inkjet transfer ‘starweeds’, a continued motif in the artist’s practice — star-shaped rosette weeds that typically grow near open roadsides, stock yards, undeveloped areas and arid pastures. Here, as a starry sky, the starweeds enter the space as shifting forms that simultaneously anchor and spread, shining as lights in the abyss. They are a constellation we might gaze up at to get lost for a moment, or use to find our way. 

Attention then shifts from skywards to the ground, with a series of reclaimed paper shopping bags, found objects which inherently transform the scale of the room. The bags are branded but obscured, reflective of the home and body bound to capitalism, to the continuously moving patterns of contemporary pedestrian living. Starched and painted to retain stiffness, the bags collectively stand like houses or buildings, small clusters or ‘neighbourhoods.’ The bags are fittingly Konnyaku-treated - a Japanese method of strengthening paper for walls and clothing - a considered connection materially and conceptually to architecture, to sites of dwelling. Each small ‘apartment building’ stands characterised with two or three ‘windows’ —photographs — stitched in. 

Again, a visual escape presents itself, this time via Fireplace (a nervous flickering), a looping video of a miniature house burning, with a corresponding sound piece by the artist—brushes on the drums. The miniature house is a traditional framing project, a model constructed by builders before devising the real thing. Here, the artist swaps the bones of a house for something much more alive—a fireplace. Homely works gather as objects laden with subjectivity and personal mythologies. ‘Home is where the heart is. The heart is in the body, the body is home to the heart.

By Lucy Rose Cunningham

Garrett Lockhart (b. 1994) lives and works in Toronto. Garrett is an artist investigating the home, the body, and the heart. Solo exhibitions include Wrinkle, Hunt Gallery, Toronto (Canada, 2024), Relay, Pumice Raft, Toronto (Canada, 2024) and Wrought Bundle, Afternoon Projects, Vancouver (Canada, 2021). Recent duo/group exhibitions include To pluck eternity along the lines of circadian rhythm, Susan Hobbs, Toronto (Canada, 2023), a little, left over, Weatherproof, Chicago (USA, 2023), Doing Time, South Parade, London (UK, 2023), Dawn Draws, Dusk Drops, Joys, Toronto (Canada, 2023), A word for underfoot; the sun, Hunt Gallery, Toronto (Canada, 2022) and Poem Objects, April April , New York (USA, 2022).