The Power Plant

This season, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery’s South Facade Billboard presents Toronto- and Vancouver-based artist Morgan Sears-Williams’s feeling along the edges, a work developed during her 2023 residency at Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts on Mnisiing (the Toronto Islands), across the water from where you are now standing. The image, which consists of several 16mm film strips collated into one frame, captures Hanlan’s Point Beach on the northwestern tip of the islands, a place the artist has been visiting for a decade. Witnessing the gradual geological erosion that is currently occurring there, Sears-Williams filmed the beach, holding the camera at hip height to capture the lakefront and intimate details of the shoreline. She then developed the film in instant coffee and buried it in the sand for five days. The beach residue altered the film’s emulsion, producing scratches, abrasions, and other material artifacts.

The tactility of this method of developing film is central to Sears-Williams’s practice and informs her interest in what American feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer describes as the “feeling image”—a cinematic language in which embodiment, emotion, and image are inextricable. It also situates her work within a lineage of women experimental filmmakers, who have countered conventional cinematic narrative structures and emphasized the craft-based aspects of the medium. The artist’s meditation on the geological erosion of Hanlan’s Point Beach also carries social and cultural implications. For nearly a century, the beach has served as an unofficial site of queer refuge and community. It was also where Toronto’s first-ever Pride celebration took place in August 1971. From the 1970s through the late 1990s, it was subject to significant anti-2SLGBTQI+ harassment and police surveillance, even as queer communities continued to advocate for and reclaim the space. Sears-Williams’s work doubly mourns the precarity of these spaces in Toronto, considering how ecological disintegration is mirrored in the disappearance of longstanding public spaces for queer communities