Figure Eight

Zoe Imani Sharpe’s debut collection Figure Eight is a meditation on impermanence from within displacement’s forced and felt motions. Departing from the demolition of the public housing complex in downtown Toronto that was her childhood home, Sharpe asks how desire is structured and, inversely, how it restructures around the point of loss. Changing form and shifting modes of address, these sequences collapse the distinction between emergence and dissolution, figure and ground, and the ruined and rebuilt, to suggest the vicissitudes of memory and time as architectures of the self.