Learning How to Float

My favourite feeling in the world is floating on my back in freshwater. With my ears submerged, sounds become quieter, muffled, and less immediately recognizable. Tilting my head back, my eyes are forced closed by the strong direct rays of the afternoon sun. Even with my eyes shut, the sensation isn’t one of darkness, but rather that of a warm and vibrant display of light and colour passing through the thin skin of my eyelids. Suspended weightlessly, buoyed upward by the water, my body is temporarily alleviated from the task of carrying itself.

The first thing a child learns to do in water isn’t to swim, but to float. Floating on your back is a survival position that keeps your face out of the water and allows you to conserve energy. A 2017 study commissioned by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution found that nearly half of respondents would immediately begin swimming if suddenly falling into open water. The Institution instead advises that floating for 60–90 seconds—the time it takes for the effects of cold shock to pass and for you to regain control of breathing—will greatly increase your chances of survival.¹

When humans lose control, we tend to revert to impulsive or protective behaviours as emotions override our ability to think rationally. Instead of floating, we flail. We exert ourselves past the point of exhaustion, losing our ability to swim to safety. Taken as metaphor, drowning describes the weight many of us feel every day. Living in a world of constant demand and expectation, mediated through individual circumstances and pressures, leaves us with little time to just be.

Daybreak is an exhibition that asks us to consider how we spend and mark the passage of time in order to identify the practices that energize us to keep our heads above water. It uses the measure of a single day as a starting point to look closer at the cycles of rest and activity inherently offered to us by the Earth’s relationship to the sun. Just as in our lives we experience periods of hardship and periods of ease, each day contains intervals of light and dark that together guide how we live. Meditating on these diurnal rhythms, the artists in Daybreak present works that draw from lived experience and collective and ancestral memory to propose strategies for slowing down and regaining control. The artists’ laborious gestures and routines of makingand attuning to their worlds invite us to pause, take a breath, and float.

A Carpathian Carol (2024) is a collage work by Guelph-based artist Taras Lachowsky. Lachowsky grew up in Sudbury, Ontario, as the youngest of ten children to his Ukrainian immigrant parents. Christmas and Easter were particularly critical times​​ for him and his siblings to witness, participate in, and absorb their Ukrainian heritage. This early interest, paired with a growing realization that much of Ukraine’s culture and territory has and continues to be appropriated by the same superpower that initially forced his parents to seek refuge in Canada,² has led to the artist’s current body of work. Inspired by the traditional practices of Vytynaky (paper cutting), Pysanky (Easter egg painting), and Vishyvanky (embroidery), Lachowsky’s style and method of collage-making seeks to modernize Ukrainian symbols, patterns, and designs and introduce them to new audiences.

The glowing eight-pointed star featured in the centre of A Carpathian Carol is the singing star, or Zirka, a reference to the first and brightest star seen after the sun goes down on Christmas Eve. Recognized by Ukrainians as a powerful symbol of hope and renewal, these stars are crafted and carried house to house while singing carols to celebrate the victory of light over darkness and to welcome the beginning of winter. Across Ukraine and its diasporas, this symbol has evolved to reflect a broader movement in Ukrainian art, fashion, and design that translates the historical symbolism of light and unity into a contemporary assertion of Ukrainian identity and resilience.³ Lachowsky repeats this eight-pointed star in several of the collages that make up his central installation.

Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Lachowsky’s collage practice has taken on heightened meaning and function as both an advocacy tool and a way of busying his hands and quieting his mind. For Lachowsky, the physical act of arranging and rearranging this cut imagery has become a ​​daily ritual that enables him to carve time out of his routine to listen to the news and call to check in on family members—transforming his anger and grief into a routine of making that is meditative, grounding, and connective.

on the edge of routine; or of sand, silt, and clay (2025) is a new video and installation work by Toronto-based multidisciplinary and multisensorial artist saysah. Produced for Daybreak, this video was filmed on the shores of Lake Ontario at the Scarborough Bluffs. Formed by glacial activity over a period of 70,000 years, the Bluffs display a geological record that dates as far back as the Great Ice Age. ​​Due to the expansiveness of their memory and knowledge, the Bluffs have long been revered as a site of profound spiritual significance, particularly by the Anishinabeg, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat nations who have long protected them. Prior to colonization, the Bluffs’ rate of erosion was steady. However, by the early 1920s deforestation and residential development along the Bluffs’ tablelands accelerated their decay, and, as a result, today’s visitors are advised of the site’s dangers while local residents are at risk of losing their homes.⁴ saysah’s work responds to this history of misappropriated land by instead forging a reciprocal and caring relationship with the territory they call home.

on the edge of routine; or of sand, silt, and clay documents an afternoon spent visiting with the Bluffs. Sinking into the site, saysah uses slow, intuitive movement to draw their body towards the wat​​er’s edge, pushing past the threshold of the shoreline and into the water. Rather than choreographing their movements, they respond to the elements, sinking their hands and feet into the sand and running their fingers along the dry, jagged edge of the cliff. In the gallery, beneath the video stands an altar displaying objects for contemplation and engagement. A basket of raw clay that was harvested at the Bluffs and a series of handheld instruments seen and heard in the video are among the items. This space functions as a dedicated area for reflection. Visitors are invited to sit, handle the objects, and respond to a series of prompts, which encourage each visitor to look closely at their own relationships to the natural world. saysah’s practices of embodied movement and altar-making respond to the exhaustion they feel living in a world that seeks to sever our relationship to land for purposes of resource extraction, profit, and control. Rather, this work invites us to step outside, both literally into n​​ature and figuratively outside of our normal routines and expectations for constant productivity, so that we may connect with and offer gratitude to the Earth that sus​​tains each of our lives.

Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist Philip Leonard Ocampo’s installation Bent Python (2026) depicts the Filipino Bakunawa, a serpent-like dragon from pre-colonial Philippine folklore, used to mythologize cosmological cycles of time. In Filipino mythology, it is believed the supreme god Bathala created seven moons, each to illuminate a single night of the week. The Bakunawa, living in the depths of the ocean or underworld, became obsessed with the moons. One night, enchanted by their beauty, the Bakunawa rose from the ocean and began devouring the moons, darkening the night’s sky. Upset, local villagers rushed outdoors and began banging pots and pans to startle the Bakunawa. Deafened by this collective action, the monster retreated before he could eat the seventh moon. During lunar eclipses, the Bakunawa is thought to return, with his bite briefly shadowing the sky before being warned off again. The Bakunawa symbolizes the forces of nature that exist beyond human control and serves as a reminder that darkness and fear are temporary, emphasizing that courage, unity, and action can overcome even the most insurmountable cosmic challenges.⁵

Painted directly onto the gallery wall, the monumental scale of Ocampo’s Bakunawa confronts visitors as they themselves are drawn towards the seven moons. Painted on wood and affixed atop the Bakunawa’s body, each moon contains references to their corresponding day of the week through various formats of 12 and 24-hour analog and digital time-telling. Hung on the walls adjacent to the central mural, Fang Charms (2026) and Due West (2026) depict the Bakunawa through a distorted photograph of a common garden snake—a nod to the ways myths evolve and endure across generations and geographies.

Oakville-based artist Tazeen Qayyum’s installation A Holding Pattern (2013, 2026) was initially conceived for Toronto Pearson International Airport through invitation by curators Lee Petrie and Stuart Keeler, working in partnership with the Art Gallery of Mississauga. Ten years prior to Qayyum’s commission, she had immigrated to Canada from Pakistan, arriving in the very terminal in which her work would later be presented. The installation repurposes Pearson’s boarding gate seating and uses the repeated pattern of a cockroach to express Qayyum’s experiences, fears, and expectations travelling across borders as a Muslim woman. For over twenty years, Qayyum has explored the motif of a cockroach as a metaphor for Western attitudes towards the Muslim “other” in a post-9/11 world ​defined by​ increased security, surveillance, and animosity towards Muslim communities and individuals.⁶ Trained in the tradition of South Asian miniature painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, Qayyum has used the technique to meticulously paint, draw, dissect, study, and reinterpret this motif in exquisite and laborious detail. In A Holding Pattern, the cockroach is reduced to its silhouette, each insect’s form individually cut and painted on acrylic and assembled on the wall to create a large lattice screen, or Jaali, a common feature of Islamic arch​​itecture.⁷ Qayyum’s acrylic cockroaches lead from the vitrine into the gallery’s entranceway, up the wall, and down into the large gallery, where they are reunited with the hand-painted floral airport seating alongside which they were originally presented. Unlike the sterile and often unwelcoming feeling of liminal spaces, Qayyum’s brightly coloured flowers and ornate leaves, inspired by pre-modern Mughal Indian paintings, are a comforting and welcoming gesture to the travellers who recognize their patterns.⁸

A Well-Trodden Path, Vortex Overflow, Walk All Over, Fall Into Decay, In A Void, and Aesthetic Pollution (2020) are ink drawings and gouache paintings on paper that continue Qayyum’s study of the cockroach. In these works, cockroaches appear broken apart, their limbs painstakingly repeated around the circular form of a manhole. These script-like marks reference Islamic calligraphy, producing a meditation on the loss of language and the reconstruction of identity through experiences of immigration and displacement.⁹

​​​Toronto-based Cree poet Connor Taylor’s poem Misery (2025) is presented in vinyl, cascading off the wall and onto the floor. It opens with a series of questions:

Is this how my legacy dies?

From an inactive heart too busy grieving?

Is this how my land and home are to die?

From the fear I harbour in secret shame?

Is this how I am to be remembered?

Am I to evermore try in saving a dying legacy?

Taylor’s practice involves writing daily, often from the perspective of strangers, stepping into their shoes and seeing the world from different and inspired angles. In Misery, the narrator’s voice expresses a sense of collective fear: feeling stuck, paralyzed by the pressure of decision-making and an inability to drive change. The poem’s recurring acknowledgment of the duration between sunrise and sunset frames the narrator’s call for daylight and renewal to illuminate and relieve us of our shared darkness:

I want my people to rise up as the sun.

To be as sunlight to my eyes,

To be free like the warmth of the sun;

I need my people to rise up like sunlight.

Projected large-scale is A Day in the Life of the Three Sisters (2023), an animated machinima (machine + cinema) produced in the 3D online virtual world Second Life by Montreal-based Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) artist Skawennati and her team of researchers at AbTeC: Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace. AbTeC is an Aboriginally determined research-creation studio lab based at the Indigenous Futures Research Centre at Concordia University. Their goal is to ensure Indigenous presence in the webpages, online environments, video games, and virtual worlds that comprise cyberspace.

A Day in the Life of the Three Sisters depicts a field of crops growing over the course of a single day. The Three Sisters are corn, beans, and squash; in the traditional Haudenosaunee companion-planting method, the three crops are grown together for mutual benefit. The corn provides a sturdy stalk for the beans to climb, the beans add nitrogen to the soil, and the squash leaves provide shade. Reimagined in contemporary cyberspace, the story of the Three Sisters transmits ​teachings of interdependence, cooperation, and sustainability through ​millennia-old Haudenosaunee plant knowledge. The Mohawk word for the Three Sisters is Tionhnhéhkwen, which translates to “they sustain us,”¹⁰ which acknowledges the critical relationship between the health of the land and the health of our families and communities.

Together, the works in Daybreak acknowledge the complex constellations of hopes, fears, rituals, and routines that make up our days and in effect, story our lives. Whether you feel like you're drowning in the pressures of everyday life or just wading in the shallows, I invite you to pause for 60 seconds and reach towards the practices that enable you to catch your breath. Be it writing or drawing, painting or collage-making, practices that get us out of our heads and into the world may just contain the tools we need to stay above water.