Infinite Sample Set

Art Museum at the University of Toronto
May 11 to July 30, 2022

Presented as part of the 2022 University of Toronto Master of Visual Studies (Studio) graduating exhibition.

The frame is the originating condition, drawing in as it keeps out, co-constituting interior and exterior, normative and otherwise. Filling in the frame with surface delivers partitions, screens, walls, windows, frames within frames: overlapping, intersecting, implicating. Each surface a sample; transtemporal, an extraction of what exists and a projection of what could come; a present promise of futurity; mimetic of itself, but a self anticipating transition, and, perhaps, also in aid of one. Each sample a version, a façade, an identity; site of administration and control, but, simultaneously, of joyous, agential emergence; coterminous limit and potentiality.

Frequency. Between sample and self. Vibration. Between optic visuality, abstracted from surface, and haptic visuality, concretely related to it. Push-and-pull. Between a centred, distant view and coming close, spreading out. Flickering. Between eyesight and eye-touch. Hovering. Beyond the visible, a queer visuality: affective seeing, attuned to that which is not quite there, but is revealed, in anticipatory glimpses, by the tremoring shape of one’s desire.

Toggling. From visual sign to haptic sign, entwined but in contradistinction: a mirror, reflecting sensation, and the self had in sensing. Oscillating. From perception as geography–perspectival, points plotted to map–to sensation as landscape, an ongoing emergence; that which exists, between subject and object, at the interface of the body. Moving. From this side to … no side, a non-binary transition; departure without arrival; a space, a duration between.

Individual narratives give way to a new context of irreducible totality. Texture (cumulative) echoes across scales, superseding-yet-arising from particularities and mutual non-identicality. The material and ephemeral substance of surface is a conduit to particularity, a source of connectivity, a transitional portal. From the waning shadow cast by the fantasy of a fixed state and stable view emerges a non-hierarchical distribution of variation, never static–an Infinite Sample Set–evolving in dynamic relation to shifting orientations: yours, theirs, ours.

—Jeremy Laing

This project was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto.

Documentation by Toni Hafkenscheid and Kirk Lisaj.

Jeremy Laing

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