Would You
Like to
Take a Seat?

I miss my Mum.
I long for true love.
I want to be a better neighbour.
What about you?

This exhibition is a series of invitations specifically for you.

You are invited to read poetry out loud. You can play with an interactive tool to choose which seat belongs to you. You can create an invitation to save a seat for someone you care about. You are invited to sit and stay as long as you wish with participatory video art that times your engagement. You are offered a phone number to say Hello and have a conversation about whatsoever you’d like to discuss.

Each surreal collage features a single chair as a space held for you or someone you know or someone you will never know. I created the visuals. You can use your imagination to co-create the sounds, smells, and story of our scene.

The collages include photography of the City of Cambridge, including the Grand River, Christopher Park, and the Cambridge to Paris Trail.

Would you like to read more of Amanda's writing about this exhibition? Read the Exhibition Publication (PDF).

I generally associate art exhibitions with glass cases, hushed galleries, and expensive admissions, none of which particularly evoke a sense of belonging. From the first moment I enter this exhibition, I can feel that it’s not a typical art gallery experience.

The viewer is invited to take a seat in one of ten dreamlike atmospheres – will you choose a beanbag in a jungle, a wicker chair on a snowy boardwalk, a red leather loveseat in the forest? The images seem almost randomly generated, combining everyday mundanity with the utterly surreal. I linger for a moment in a seat: a plastic chair hovering at an intersection in front of a beautiful Ontario sunset. It’s been a while since I’ve lived here but it pulls on a memory – of wiping off dirty deck chairs on the first nice spring day, of taking photos of the most magnificent sunsets over parking lots. It’s funny how an image by an artist I’ve never met, and only saw through a fluke of a lottery draw, leads me back to this vivid memory of my old home.

The experience continues with a series of invitations. “Which seat belongs to you?” leads to a personality quiz. After thoughtfully answering the questions, I’m pleased to see I’m the cute jungle beanbag, then laugh when I learn that the results are all randomly generated anyway. “Will you sit?” lets you share a seated moment with the artist, and “Will you say hello?” gives you the chance to call her. “Will you stay?” times how long you stay on the page, and “Who are you saving a seat for?” asks you to invite someone else to sit on one of the seats.

The entire exhibition invites me to participate until I feel a part of it: I linger over the images, go back to re-read the poems, watch the seconds tick up on “Will you stay?” It feels like sharing a joke with the artist, and more importantly, like I can meaningfully participate in the exhibition. In a world saturated with online content, it’s rare that something digital can feel so human. Yes, I would like to take a seat, and stay a while.

Dasha is a multimedia artist and arts educator based in Vancouver. Born in Russia, she immigrated to Canada in 2006 and lived in Ontario for over 10 years before moving to the West Coast. She works in ceramics, painting, and textile arts, and has recently been exploring woodworking for functional and sculptural artworks. Dasha's ethos for both art and education is to create a welcoming, playful space for making and appreciating art and craft in all its forms.

Would You Like to Take a Seat? is an opportunity to revisit some of the region’s familiar places with a fresh perspective. At the same time, visitors will tour the imaginative landscapes of the artist’s dreams. These double aims are achieved by taking care to domesticate each setting, in the sense of the word’s Latin root, domus (“home”). The dreamscapes look as comfortable and welcoming as the streets, parks and trails that most visitors are likely to know well, so that one is never disoriented by the juxtaposition of interior and exterior, of the everyday and the dreamlike. Whether the subject is familiar or surreal, each digital collage is made inviting by an inspired arrangement of colour, surface texture and symbolism.

In Jungle Beanbag, the chair’s brown leather looks warmed and softened by the sunlight pouring in from beyond the frame. At a distance, the beanbag could be mistaken for the shell of a tortoise, or the scales of a coiled snake — a reminder that guests of this space will be sharing it with the native jungle fauna. In Plastic Paradise, a pedestrian crossing on Water Street flashes green beneath an overcast sky. The setting sun warms the clouds to a rosy peach colour that calls to mind the clouds “of cotton candy” in the poem “Opening”. A patio chair urges the viewer to ignore the traffic signal’s invitation to continue walking. By contrast, the red traffic light that tells the viewer of Sitting in the Light to stop and linger is intended to be obeyed. This landscape contains no recognizable landmarks. Instead, the combination of snowy foreground and reflective background captures the experience of sitting outdoors in the most Canadian of seasons. Glittering disco balls fill the sky, a visual metaphor evoking the sparkle of falling snowflakes.

Each collage extends a visual invitation to enter a place of comfort, or nostalgia, or grieving. What the visitor ultimately finds there will depend on the life journey that has led them to the gallery space, the personal story which the poem “Re-Opening” invites us to reflect upon. The interactive works provide even more direct prompts to reflection, appealing in turn to our curiosity (“Which seat belongs to you?”), our memories of hardship and loss (“Do you see [...] the crying spot?”), our concern for loved ones (“Who needs to be invited?”), among other emotions. But perhaps the most affecting invitations are those printed on white paper and attached to canvas with painter’s tape, an adhesive designed to remove easily, without leaving a trace — a subtle hint that the questions they pose expect sincere answers, from the gut, without hesitation. These invitations convey their urgency by acknowledging that they are temporary, ephemeral, and the healing self-awareness they offer to help us find is an opportunity to be seized.

Robert DiPardo was born in St. Catharines, Ontario. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto (Hon. B.A.) and Brock University (M.A.). His interests include music, English and Italian, literature, biology and computer science.