This City, 2022
Jenine Marsh and Alex Turgeon
November 12 - January 14, 2023
Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto


This City is an exhibition of new collage, sculpture and poetry by Toronto-based artists Jenine Marsh and Alex Turgeon. Populating space with slips of language and material, their works investigate oppression and creation within gendered and monetized urban life. A text by the artists follows.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.

A city is a city is a city is a city. Defined in an instant, a city is bound to its parameters of scale. A city is constantly malleable and monumental in its multiplicity. In self reflection it looks inwards, towards the navel, doing somersaults ad nauseum. A city has a sense memory that is tattooed across boroughs, along boughs, and is captured in the plans and elevations of the night’s vertical watch. It smells of fables formed from delicate gardens, while roots grow out saccharine labyrinths of power. It is a brush that blooms in the corner of mouths, wilting under oppressive domes of perspiration. A city is as vast as the exponential grifts contained within, hoarding tensions and pent up releases. A city is as viscous as mud with an oil slick simmer, parading gasoline rainbows with hallowed pots for feet. It is as stiff as two boots spread wide, like Helios, stretched towards the sun, and from between its colossal statuary, coins will shower as gold. A city is a performance; always a reflection, but never a mirror. A city is a beefcake smile slap to the face, a brawny zone with the touch of concrete elegance. A city is stretched at both ends pulling up opposing directions, until that fateful punctuation of pop puts everything back together again, from whence it fell. A city, by any other creed, reeks of what dreams may come, whence they go, and how the breeze shifts the sky aflutter—all the while casting huge shadows. Wrought with iron fortitudes, a city becomes flora in the distance, where the horizon is as bejeweled and unremarkable as money. A city is a semblance of many, speaking directly to none. A city is invisible, never truly known in completion. A city wraps its musculature around the structures that gave it a name: this city, and by any other name would taste so sweet.


Clutch, 2022
Found plastic purse, loonies, flowers, nails, wire, synthetic rubber, acrylic UV varnish, polyurethane adhesive.

this type of rupture, 2022
Found plastic purse, flowers, newspaper, loonies, wire, hardware, polyurethane adhesive, synthetic rubber, acrylic UV varnish.

values and positions, 2022
Flowers, newspaper clippings, wire, synthetic rubber, acrylic UV varnish.

Public Fountain, 2022
Pennies, tin model train figures, newspaper clippings, crushed leaves, steel, hotplate, flowers, wire, resin, synthetic rubber, acrylic UV varnish, hardware.


This City, 2022 (floor work)
Plastic scale model figures, coins, sand and detritus.