Please… Touch the Grass is an exhibition at the OCAD University Graduate Gallery at 205 Richmond St. West of three new sculptures and a site-responsive set of walls dividing the gallery into distinct zones. The exhibition —along with extra–exhibition materials and supporting narratives— explores how reality is constructed between the virtual and physical, the inseparability of the two, and the unseen labour which goes into their construction.
In the first gallery zone are Directional Shielding — three sculptures evoking a cable meandering through the space— and Cutscene 1 — a scattered field of cardboard Nintendo controllers, set down mid-action and indefinitely abandoned by their players. Across the plastic turf threshold in the second zone of the gallery is Joycon Drift — a driftwood log suspended over a polygonal patch of sand, pointing towards the outside.
The artworks combine manufacturing and building materials (cardboard pulp forming, extruded foam insulation, microcrystalline wax) with materials indexical of outdoor leisure (driftwood, turf grass, polymer sand). Together the works’ material and referent choices complicate boundaries of natureculture —Donna Haraway's term for the inextricability of nature and culture. Influenced by contemporary sculpture artists, such as Catherine Telford-Keogh and Lotus Kang, the work is grounded in techniques of material shifting, interplay of referent and abstraction, and manipulating the flow of the gallery space.
Analysis of iterative studio process, objectives, and the artworks themselves are framed by three key texts: Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011), Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006), and Donna Harraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto (2016).
The metaphor of grass is considered as a field where bodies in play self–organise, how the lawn presents a boundary space to be negotiated among neighbours, and as grass outfields of city parks representing a zone of co-negotiated social agreements. Subjects of play, labour, outdoor recreation, and digital content consumption are informed by the artists’ memories and lived experiences. Narrative segments throughout the paper further illustrate themes present in the work through the authors’ formative memories of family, the internet and gaming, bumping up against permissions/access, and shifting landscapes.