S4M4R3S
By aenl (Anna Eyler and Nicolas Lapointe)
On view at the Trinity Square Video vitrine (main hallway, 401 Richmond St W, Toronto)
November 25 – January 15
Silent installation
S4M4R3S unfolds as a quiet ritual of duration. Mounted on the wall of the Trinity Square Video vitrine, a small thermal printer waits, dormant for most of the day. At an unpredictable moment, it activates without announcement, releasing a single stylised image of a maple seed. The print drifts downward in a slow spiral, echoing the familiar descent of a samara. On the floor below, these slips of paper accumulate into a vertical column that thickens over time — part waterfall, part stalactite, part record of passing days.
Nearby, a small screen loops a pixelated video of sunrise and sunset. Its shifting colours move almost imperceptibly, unfolding both in slow motion and in real time. Together, these elements form a kinetic ecology of delay, repetition, and quiet anticipation. The work resists immediacy; its gestures are small, its pace deliberate. What it offers is not spectacle but a space in which attention recalibrates, where the viewer is invited to feel the shape of time rather than rush through it.
In this installation, the Montreal-based duo aenl (Anna Eyler and Nicolas Lapointe) continue their exploration of the porous boundaries between physical and digital worlds. Their practice often dwells in the tension between technological precision and the more elusive forces that animate perception — the mystical, the atmospheric, the barely seen. Here, the sterile reproduction of the thermal printer meets the organic form of the samara, a seed engineered for drift and dispersal. The result is a meditation on what technology can replicate, and what it cannot: vitality, unpredictability, the quiet insistence of natural cycles.
The vitrine itself shapes the encounter. Positioned in the main hallway of 401 Richmond Street West, it is a space meant to be passed, glimpsed, or returned to. Some visitors may come upon the work mid-print; others may see only its aftermath. Over days and weeks, the growing column of paper makes visible what is usually unnoticed — the slow accumulation of small gestures, the subtle architectures of time.
S4M4R3S invites viewers to slow down, to linger at the threshold of the vitrine, and to witness a process that unfolds on its own terms. Here, time is not a resource to be spent but a material that quietly gathers.
