Solo exhibition at Roberta Pelan, Toronto
November 12th - December 27th, 2016

She wipes a layer of her skin cells off the shelves and the hairs she sweeps up are all her own. There is no one else to attribute the cigarette butts to and she knows exactly what was consumed on the dirty dishes. A neighbour drops a fork and murmurs something. A neighbour with Tourette’s syndrome is playing Call of Duty. Polytonality. There are scratches on the floor that she didn’t make. White paint peels off the walls and reveals a dull seafoam green. The pungent smell of garlic fills the air along with the sound of trickling water as the tenant upstairs washes their dinner down the drain. The pipes threaded through the building are carrying everyone’s waste like a circulatory system. She still smells him on her jacket. It takes two showers for her to wash him off her body and three days for his saliva and sweat to leak out of her pores before the lingering taste is gone. She wakes to the sound of claws scratching the floor above her head. At the foot of her bed there is a large bridge. She watches people cross it day and night as they dance, take off their clothes, argue and perform unexplainable rituals. They are entranced by its liminality. It’s a stage, it’s a gym, it’s a bedroom. It shape-shifts without moving. She doesn’t have curtains and thinks of it as her way of giving back. An exchange in privacy. Her bearded dragon lives in a glass tank with a heat lamp and UV light that simulates the climate of Australia. Taped to the back of the tank is an image of a desert that superficially puts her mind at ease about the creature’s displacement. A single cricket has escaped from the tank and is shrieking somewhere in the apartment. As a group they sing softly but once isolated they get louder. They say it’s a way of claiming their territory. As though space can be solidly delineated. As though territory can ever be fixed. 

-Brittany Shepherd