Oak Room

Artwork in Oak Room

– Sponsored by TD

In the Oak Room, once a lounge, collage sets an itinerary for reorienting a place.

Thato Toeba locates this work in relation to Thaba-Tseka, the town where they grew up in rural Lesotho. Thaba-Tseka was cast as a “development project,” a promise of progress promoted by the Canadian International Development Agency and the World Bank, tying the country’s potential to capitalist expansion. Toeba situates “development” as a system that manufactures centres and peripheries, and trains our sense of what is necessary, advanced, and indispensable. Working from images in public circulation, interiors, street scenes, domestic rooms, gatherings and taste, Toeba cuts them loose from the claim of “need.” Reassembled as upright cut-outs, the figures stand in a field of relations that honours their self-regard and ties to others. In refusing the ways documentary photography can make poverty look inevitable, the work disrupts the visual script that cues development aid and authorizes its terms.

Across three layered panels, the sculptural collage is built in depth. Cut-outs choreograph the fragments as a gathering of people across different times and places, while silhouette mirrors keep the composition in motion. The mirror reflects the station’s passing bodies and folds us into the work, showing how quickly images travel without context, and how urgently context is sought. Stretching across the panels, the mirror enlarges the collage’s reach, drawing the eye up, down, and through. The collage rests on bare oak, a living archive of time immemorial for Indigenous communities, yet repurposed by colonial settlers as a marker of wealth and territorial boundary. Toeba grounds the montage within this quiet, conflicting structure of value. As you move, the work reorganizes itself, shifting scale, proximity, and authority, and asking what else might be assembled from where we stand.