Alt-Arts:Hearth Foursome
A series of profiles, written by Ashley Culver, highlighting alternative art spaces in Toronto and the people who make them.
Misbah Ahmed, Dalmatians Running, 2019- 2024. Glazed ceramic, 11 ¼ × 10 inches. Courtesy of the artist & Hearth. Photo: Philip Leonard Ocampo
How do you keep the fire alive after five years? For Hearth, the artist-run space and curatorial collective of Benjamin de Boer, Rowan Lynch, Sameen Mahboubi, and Philip Ocampo, the answer is to return to the beginning. “We talk a lot about doing things cyclically with the seasons,” says Lynch. The foursome is celebrating their fifth year together as Hearth and the new season by reestablishing a physical location.
On Saturday, April 27, 2024, Hearth hosted the opening for the group exhibition Five Years: New Strata II. This is the inaugural exhibition in their new home: Unit 6 at 1267A St. Clair Avenue West in Toronto. The collective took this meaningful moment to reconnect with the artists who exhibited in Hearth’s very first exhibition in 2019: Misbah Ahmed, Shannon Garden-Smith, Andrew Harding, and Cadence Planthara. “We return to stratification’s relationship with time,” reads an Instagram caption on Hearth’s account this spring. “We enter a recursive process of reflection: a spiral that deviates from itself each time it circles back.”
L-R: Hearth members Philip Leonard Ocampo, Rowan Lynch, Benjamin de Boer, and Sameen Mahboubi in front of New Strata II. Polaroid, April 27th, 2024. Photo: Atanas Bozdarov
It is easy to forget how much happens and changes in half a decade. In 2019, life looked much different for each of Hearth’s members. At the time, the quartet was romantically paired off. Lynch and Mahboubi were dating as were de Boer and Ocampo. De Boer had graduated the previous year from the University of Toronto, where they studied philosophy and archaeology, and they felt like an outsider looking to bridge their interests in writing and visual arts. Lynch, who like Ocampo had recently graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD U), was working multiple part-time jobs, often in the role of assistant to a gallery director or a ceramicist, supplemented by contract projects. Mahboubi was in his second year at OCAD U, worked as a legal clerk at a law office, and was fresh to the city and art scene, having moved to Toronto after working at a steel mill in Hamilton. Ocampo had accepted a job as programming coordinator at Xpace Cultural Centre the year prior and had just curated his first group exhibition with the organization, The Bald Eagle’s Claw. At a noise concert, over Greek food, and at gallery openings, they discussed the possibilities of creating something together.
The group founded Hearth in a house where Lynch was cat sitting that summer. Not long after, they came across a Kijiji ad for a garage on Ulster Street just east of the heavily postered and graffiti-covered convenience store Three Star Variety on Bathurst Street. “We started off from very humble beginnings,” says Ocampo. He notes the lack of bathroom and plumbing of any kind in their original space.
New Strata, 2019, installation view, Hearth. Photo: Philip Leonard Ocampo
New Strata II, 2024, installation view, Hearth. Photo: Philip Leonard Ocampo
New Strata, their debut exhibition, opened November 23, 2019. They rolled the garage door up all the way, letting visitors bundled in bulky coats spill out onto the driveway. “So funny to choose to open a gallery in an unheated garage in November,” says Planthara. Yet, as she recalls, despite the cold, the event was well attended. One of her contributions to the 2019 exhibition consisted of embedding freshwater pearls into the drywall. She replicated the piece as Pearls in the wall (2019-2024) in Five Years: New Strata II, inlaying three freshwater pearls into the walls of the new space. Repetition and revisiting past moments permeate the reunion exhibition and reflect Hearth’s interest in “sustained dialogue.”
A version of Dalmatians Running (2019-2024), a ceramic work by Ahmed placed on a raw wooden platform slightly raised off the floor, was actually present in the first iteration. Since the initial exhibition, Ahmed has removed the pair of handles so the large vessel could fit into a kiln. The speckled stoneware is now handle-less and glazed.
Not long after de-installing that first exhibition, Garden-Smith began work on a new sculpture involving small stones the size of marbles drilled with holes and strung together. She had no idea Woven Stone (2020-2024) would be presented by Hearth, and says, “It feels like no time and an eternity has passed since the first show five years ago.” The chain-link weaving of pebbles hangs from a gap in the gridded drop ceiling and rests in curls on the floor.
“It’s a special gift to have the space and trust to reflect on a project from five years ago, to remix and expand on previous narratives, make new work, and to be part of opening a new space,” says Harding.
The new space was a long time coming. In the winter of 2021, Hearth moved out of the rented garage and began a period of spacelessness. During this time of itinerancy, the collective guest curated and programmed events with Dundas Museum & Archives, Pumice Raft, SPACEMAKER II, the plumb, and Trinity Square Video. They continued collaborating with artists and writers in a range of methods beyond exhibitions, such as producing cassettes, publications, broadsides, audio playlists released online via Mixcloud, and workshops. In April 2022, they launched the “Wage Transparency Project”: a Google Doc populated by information submitted anonymously by arts workers. But working without a space proved a challenge, and the group took a hiatus from October 2022 to October 2023. Although they maintained their friendships in the one-year pause, it offered a welcome time off.
“We were able to do a lot of interesting programming and push our work outside of the box,” says Mahboubi. “In saying that I am deeply relieved to have a space again.”
Cadence Planthara, Pearls in the wall, 2019-2014. Freshwater pearls. Courtesy of the artist & Hearth. Photo: Philip Leonard Ocampo
This past winter, Jordan Elliott Prosser, who was searching for a studio, reached out to the team with an offer to share an available space he had found in his St. Clair West neighborhood. Prosser had frequented Hearth’s former garage location and had exhibited a solo installation, titled Travellers, there from January 16 to February 16, 2021. Together with Prosser, Hearth signed a three-year commercial lease for a second-floor space above Ontario Honey House. They were familiar with the area and see it as an “arts corridor.” Lynch says, “We purposely made our hours the same as the plumb’s hours because we’re friends with that crew.”
Before opening the new space, Prosser and the foursome did a lot of renovations. Notably, they rearranged interior walls to construct two small studios in the back: one for Prosser and another for Ocampo. They also stripped the floor and painted the exposed oriented strand board. Everyone was nervous about selecting a paint color. They are aware of the local lineage of independent venues with painted chipboard floors: Little Sister had blue floors, The Loon had pink, and Main Street Gallery had green. It felt like a significant and defining choice. Eventually, the group picked a porch paint named “honey mist,” which they more affectionately refer to as “manila.”
As the crew recounts sending swatches to their group chat from the hardware paint aisle, I cannot help but compare their sense of camaraderie to that of a band. “The four of us were figures in each other’s lives, and we wanted to be closer in proximity to each other,” says de Boer. He holds out his phone to show me their two group chats. A serious one for project conversation named “professional tortoise spun grace” and another one for memes and such named “holy shit new talk of the different town.” Talking with Hearth today, I notice how they continue each other’s thoughts, laugh at each other’s bits, eagerly acknowledge the skills and personality traits each member brings to the group, and gush about their relationship.
Hearth centers collaboration and community, and their friendship of four glows brightly. The name, ignited by an archaeological understanding of the term, points to this. “As a structural element in the makeup of a house and a tool providing warmth, light, and food, a hearth gathers us toward itself and toward each other.”
Shannon Garden Smith, Woven Stone, 2020-2024. Drilled stones, steel wire, 115 × 24 × 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist & Hearth. Photo: Philip Leonard Ocampo
by Ashley Culver
Ashley Culver (b. 1986) is an artist and writer based in Tkaronto/Toronto.
