Dani Leder: Trash R Us: OVR | Toronto

We are proud to present Dani Leder's Canadian debut with Trash R Us: new works spanning collage, a time bracket (from the birth of Christ to May Day), and an audio piece—marking the artist's first foray into sound. 

Leder's mind map series started in 2021 as page-bound collages for the Illiberal Arts catalogue, an exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Made in the heat of the covid-19 pandemic / global shutdown, these early pieces broached our psychic landscape, capturing states of unrest, death, value, and inertia. One year later, Trash R Us (2022) revisits our shared viral burden and libidinal what-now with a magnified matricidal lens.

Leder's mind maps are zeitgeist artifacts: she links found photographs and texts with her handwriting in an ambulatory dreamlike logic. In Trash R Us, two sprawling collages on archival acrylic sheet, Energy Crisis 1 & 2, tackle self and psychical questions. In the gallery's construction site, they sit for us like a professor's bloated whiteboard—like a hungry sleuth's grid of incriminating debris.