Mina Totino: Teeny
March 14 – May 4, 2025
The Cabinet | Room 4390 – SFU School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Reception: March 14, 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM | Refreshments will be served
Teeny consists of a cluster of small handmade clay pots on an asymmetrical side table. Totino designed the table with Wayne Arsenault, who built it out of salvaged wood. With its five edges, four different legs (one shod with a metal shoe), the table sits stably on the floor of the Cabinet. Totino made the numerous colourful pots using the traditional Japanese kurinuki technique of carving out small blocks of clay using sharp and dull implements, and gentle pinches, in a slow and meditative practice. Each pot is unique, and some of them resemble Japanese teacups. Like Heidegger’s famous jug, these tiny, hollow objects work to gather the fourfold, earth, sky, mortals and divinities, in the constitution of the thing. More than this, as an aesthetic object, Teeny beguiles us with the myriad differences in each pot’s size, shape, texture, colour and luminosity. The multicoloured glazes revel in drips, spatters and puckerings. Following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of “reparative reading”—a type of reading that cultivates patience, compassion, and love—Teeny is a form of reparative art which reminds us “to make capacious room to grieve with and for everything humanity is losing to plural crises today” (Zoe Todd). With its scattered teeny-weeny sculptures, Teeny gathers, modestly and ceaselessly, our eyes, lips, hands and hearts.
Curated by Denise Oleksijczuk
Biography
Mina Totino is a Canadian painter and potter based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Totino's work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions in Montreal, Toronto and Berlin. Totino first came to prominence in the 1985 Young Romantics exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Her work has been exhibited notably in Vancouver at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Artspeak, SFU Galleries, Western Front, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and most recently the West Vancouver Art Museum. Internationally her work was shown at the Centro d'Arte Contemporanea, Ticino, Italy, Centre d'Art Centemporain and Dialogai Geneva, Switzerland, Latvian Center of Contemporary Art, Riga, Latvia, Canada House, London, UK and Galerie Likorfabrik, Berlin, Germany among others.