A white beekeeping outfit, complete with netted veil and hood. A pair of bright red Coleman coolers next to silver sachets of tea. Well-thumbed copies of Euell Gibbons’ Stalking the Wild Asparagus and Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust. Grow lights shining on rows of tiny tomato seedlings; a table overflowing with spider plants; some multi-sided dice resting on a high shelf; and a half-moon bedroom doubling as a wood-fired sauna.
These are just a few of the treats tucked into Walking Studio, the centrepiece work in Diane Borsato’s current solo show at the Art Gallery of York University.
“I was interested in field laboratories as a model for a way of working as an artist,” Borsato explains during a tour of the show. The 11-foot-by-18-foot structure, designed by the artist in collaboration with Adrian Blackwell and Jane Hutton, is “a mobile building that functions as a studio-slash-field-lab” to accommodate practices that are social, site-responsive, peripatetic and relational.
Beyond its immediate appeal as a cute, rustic, cabin-like getaway, Walking Studio may well read as a significant material marker of the way Borsato’s many ephemeral works—from 2001’s Touching 1000 People to 2011’s revolving Walking Studio residencies at Don Blanche—have gelled into a very concrete art career.
To find out more, read on at Canadianart.ca.
(Image of Diane Borsato's Walking Studio by Michael Maranda, via Canadianart.ca and courtesy the artist and the AGYU)
