EMILY SHANAHAN

WORTH

Guest artist, sponsored by Ufuk Gueray

5 — 27 September 2026

Friday — Sunday: 12 — 6 pm

Opening reception: Saturday 5 September @ 3 pm

Artist talk: Saturday 19 September @ 3 pm

Artist present: Saturday/Sunday 12-13 and 19-20

E: The materials are worthless in a sense. The works are made mostly from cardboard boxes and price tags. Things that make buying and selling products possible. But they’re attached to products of varying worth. Clothing mostly, for the price tags. All kinds of products arrived in the cardboard boxes. Then they’re recycled or thrown in the trash.

M: The works undo the utilitarian value of the original materials. The cardboard box moves products all over the world and the price tag records a (fluctuating) price. And then those disused materials become surfaces to paint and draw on. Creating a dynamic image you might get lost in.

E: Repurposing it… giving it added, potential value. Is that what art does? Takes a blank thing and gives it value?

Mommy and daddy are talking about mommy‘s artwork now. We’re gonna cross the causeway which is a kind of bridge, remember? You see it down there. We’re gonna drive over the water.

M: I think your flattened box invites this wild imagination about things that were manufactured to be super efficient. As you deconstruct them, they’re no longer doing what they were intended to do. You’re making these small practices that undo the function of buying all this stuff.

E: Taking those materials apart and paying attention to them in a different way. Carving out a new role for them, one that I determine. The imagery distances us from those materials. Some of the formal qualities of what I’m drawing, the orbs and simple geometric shapes, border on celestial.

See the boat? OK now we’re crossing this bridge and now we are in Cape Breton. We’re on Cape Breton Island right now. You can see your hand in your foot?

M: Maybe we find that so engaging because we want to escape capitalism. This system that we live in where we exchange money for labour and goods, over and over. So it’s celestial but I would think about your imagery as surrealist or even dada. Maybe it’s about producing a surrealism around these basic capitalistic practices, things that allow us to explore an undoing or something fundamentally other. It’s less about spiritualism maybe than escapism.

It’s another hour and a half should I play something for you sweetie or do you wanna justook out your window?