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Kadrah Mensah: surely you're joking

In support of emerging arts practitioners, Mason Studio has proudly partnered with X in Residence to provide gallery space for their residency program.

In the first collaborative exhibition, The Gallery at Mason Studio had the honour of hosting Kadrah Mensah’s surely, you’re joking, from April 1-30, 2023, created during her time with X in Residence. Working in video, sculpture, and installation, Mensah is interested in normalizing digital bodily manipulation as an act that is both liberatory and alienating.

Curated by Magdalyn Asimakis, a central question for Mensah is, “Who determines personhood?” Her artistic inquiries do not only consider digital body modification as an aspirational act of transformation, but also how these desires relate to socio-political acts of oppression against physical bodies. These ‘social horrors,’ as the artist calls the latter, create a desire to escape the body into liberatory digital spaces where one can create the reality they desire. However, at the other end of the spectrum, this catalyzes in-groups that are founded on exclusion. From this, Mensah asks, “What purpose does the body serve when we trade somatic intelligence for artificial intelligence? What is lost? What is repressed?”

For more information about Kadrah Mensah’s surely you’re joking, visit the X in Residence website here. Image courtesy of the artist and X in Residence, Toronto. Photography by Jessann Reece.

Kadrah Mensah is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist and creative technologist. Her practice is an exploration of technological intimacy as a site of freedom, escape, and identification. By leaning into the frictional paradoxes inherent to survival, she uses humour as a source of relief and resolution to confront mounting absurdity. The internet is her foundational instrument. Kadrah holds a BFA in New Media from Toronto Metropolitan University. She recently completed a residency focused on AI and algorithmic culture with UKAI Projects. Her work has been shown at The Music Gallery, Xpace Cultural Centre, and Whippersnapper Gallery. She currently resides in Toronto.

X in Residence is a residency in Toronto for artists and curators. Providing residents with space, resources, mentorship, and networking opportunities, XiR aims to support emerging arts practitioners by emphasizing artistic process and experimentation. Prioritizing arts practitioners from marginalized communities, XiR aims to remove accessibility boundaries to research and mentorship and foster cross-generational dialogues that nourish Toronto’s art ecology.

This project is curated by Magdalyn Asimakis, a curator, writer, and researcher based in Toronto. Her practice explores embodied experience in relation to Western display practices and methods of knowing. She is the co-founder of the curatorial collective ma ma, and is currently the Executive Director of Images Festival and a PhD candidate at Queen’s University.

The Gallery at Mason Studio is a cultural and creative hub for artists, designers, and makers by providing space and opportunities for emerging talent and established professionals. Individuals from equity-deserving communities are prioritized in the Gallery to ensure diverse ideas and experiences are expressed through exhibitions, talks, events and programming.

Everyone is welcome to the Gallery to experience how culture, business and creativity can come together to make better.

Hours: 10 am to 4 pm, Monday through Friday

91 Pelham Avenue
Toronto, ON M6N 1A5

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2033: An Optimistic Future

As part of the DesignTO Festival, we create a place to experience everyday life in an optimistic future. Set in the year 2033, Mason Studio, Goodee, along with various collaborators, co-create a place where the care for people and our planet comes before all else. We collectively empower communities to look at the future with excitement and joy.

Includes a site-specific installation by Mason Studio, a Market Gallery featuring products promoting people, an indoor garden to rejuvenate the mind and body, a café playhouse for kids and adults, a hands-on workshop, a book exchange library, and a workspace for post-secondary students.

Visit the event page to learn more about the experimental project.

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Dom Cheng Exhibition on at The Gallery At Mason Studio

Architect and designer, Dom Cheng, takes over The Gallery at Mason Studio this month with his improvisational wall drawing. A graphic representation of plant matter taking over the walls.

Dom wants us to consider what would happen to our everyday environments when we're not here to control nature.

Come by Mason Studio to see his drawings in person. Until September 31, 2022.

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Apply Now

Mason Studio is growing, and we want you to be a part of this exciting evolution of our company. We seek motivated, determined and inspired individuals to drive our collective growth. Though we are always looking for people excited about our work to join our team, we currently have a few open positions actively looking to be filled. APPLY NOW

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The Passion Project

New exhibition and talk at The Gallery at Mason Studio.

During the fall semester of 2021, Mason Studio led a course at The School of Interior Design at Toronto Metropolitan University. The course guided students to recognize the motivations of a community using design as a tool to empower, enrich and contribute. On display are four students’ work from this course.

Join us May 2th for an upcoming event exploring the potential of design to make better in the world. We welcome aspiring and established designers to our experimentation studio to discuss the impact that interior design has on people, and our responsibility as professionals to contribute to social conversations. Together we celebrate the next generation of designers and the potential we have in contributing to a more ethical and responsible future.

Tuesday, May 24th
Mason Studio, 91 Pelham Ave.
Toronto, ON
6:00pm-8:00pm
RSVP info@masonstudio.com

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DesignTO Immersive Experience

In conjunction with the DesignTO festival, Mason Studio presented a multi-sensory installation that transported participants into an ethereal moon-lit oceanscape — a place of quiet wonder.

A universal yet individual experience of the moon reflected on the water is captured in this sensory installation. It could be a lake or an ocean, with friends or alone, but we all potentially see the full moon collectively and yet experience it individually.

Housed within our new studio space the installation explores the idea of how can we inspire human connection through a shared experience.

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Future of Retail

Stanley Sun, joins Supreet Barhay of WZMH and Ilana Weitzman from Electric Autonomy to discuss the future-forward ways retail is shifting, and how design as a tool can be used to create a better retail experience and help businesses be more resilient.⁠

April 7, 1:30pm
For tickets and more information please visit the Interior Design Show, Toronto

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DesignTO Youth Exhibition

Mason Studio recently hosted a DesignTO Youth exhibition in our new gallery space.

DesignTO Youth is a community engagement program which offers youth access to creative disciplines and professionals, culminating in a public exhibition of their work. Working in partnership with SKETCH Working Arts, this year’s DesignTO Youth program focuses on place making, involving critical reflections on our individual and collective relationships to space.

Delivered in the form of a six-week residency program plus DesignTO Festival exhibition, youth artists are given opportunities to engage with and discuss civic issues and public space through talks and workshops. The program features talks with Gallery TPW Executive Director Noa Bronstein, artists Benjamin de Boer, Phat Le, Florence Yee and Arezu Salamzadeh, and planner and community organizer Chiyi Tam, plus an empathy mapping workshop with Urban Minds, a non-profit youth engagement organization.

Youth artists include dairysam, Yasmine Hassen, Brian Jiang, Enna Kim, Winston LeYonnick, and Ashley Meza-Wong working across different artistic and design disciplines.

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førs/wønder Interview

førs studio, a product design company founded by Vanessa Eckstein (Blok Design) and long time collaborator with Mason Studio recently interviewed Ashley and Stanley asking thoughtful questions about our process, the importance of experimentation and what gives us hope.

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Interior Design Interview

Mason Studio co-founder Stanley Sun, and Interior Design magazine editor-in-chief Cindy Allen, discuss the idea of experimentation as process on Instagram Live and available for viewing anytime on Interior Design magazine's instagram video page.

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