Laura Moore | We Were Here

Laura Moore

We Were Here

October 16 - November 22, 2025

Opening Reception: Thursday October 16, 6-8PM

Artist in attendance

Slightly off topic - as there are no books or multiple in the show - but I was asked to write a text to accompany Laura Moore’s new exhibition, which opens tomorrow night at Zalucky Contemporary, in Toronto. I was a fan of her early soap stone sculptures, and really enjoyed her most recent ZC exhibition, Memory Quilts, in which large scale textiles were used to represent circuit boards. It was a pleasure having time to spend with her work and getting to know her better. 

 

"In 1980, the US Department of Energy tasked a panel of experts with frightening future generations from a nuclear waste site, two-thousand feet underground in New Mexico. The problem was time - the radioactive waste would remain dangerous for ten thousand years, likely outlasting civilization.

The task force, therefore, had to devise methods to communicate across multiple millennia, without language, and possibly to post-human species. One preposterous suggestion was to "scatter CD ROM disks around. People will pick them up, wonder what they say, read them. Digitizing is the wave of the future."

Laura Moore’s practice contemplates a similar speculative moment: when the detritus of technological progress is discovered by future audiences.

Her body of work includes exquisitely rendered soapstone computer mice, calculators, Atari joysticks, Nintendo controllers, Sony Walkmans, USB memory sticks, and naturally, cellphones. Taken together, these ‘future fossils’ form a kind of museum of obsolescence, but they also represent an early example of the post-human itself, the anthropomorphic extension.1

There’s hardly a societal ill that pundits can’t pin on the smart phone, with considerable pearl-clutching at the increasingly blurred relationship between us and our devices. The hysteria is not unfamiliar. Several subjects of Moore’s sculptures once too represented seismic shifts, and contemporaneous controversies. 

William Gibson observed that the “Sony Walkman has done more to change human perception than any virtual reality gadget”2. When it was first released the Paris paper Le Nouvel Obs interviewed young people about the device, asking questions such as “Are men with Walkmans human or not? Are they losing contact with reality? Worried about the fate of humanity?” One of the interviewees replied “Your question is out-of-date.”

The boombox - a home stereo with a handle - had a profound cultural impact, fostering both community and individual self-expression, while soundtracking urban street culture. Cinematic depictions reinforced the association with romance and rebellion: from heart-broken Lloyd Dobler’s window serenade in Say Anything to Radio Raheem in Do The Right Thing personifying the determination to be seen and heard.3 Lawmakers responded by introducing bans in public spaces, and the boombox became known as the ghetto-blaster, among other pejoratives.4 

The tape recorders in We Were Here are covered in mosaic tile, encrusted and entombed. Colour-blocked marble tracings of their once-functional form translate the objects into an inherent and encoded visual language. This reverse-erosion buries the object through incremental fossilization, adding a layer between the disused object and our understanding of it. A tool for cultural production and playback, now communicates mutely.

Using the same technique, circuit boards are transformed into map-like tablets, at once decorative and data-based. The conflation of data storage with human and cultural memory builds on Moore’s The Future From Above, vivid pencil crayon drawings that liken circuit boards to ancient architectural ruins.

The future ruins in New Mexico are still waiting for their warnings. The Human Interference Task Force is expected to finalize their nuclear semiotics by 2033, over fifty years after the archaeologists, anthropologists, artists, science fiction writers, linguists, and futurists were first assigned the challenge of communicating to a future they can’t even fathom.

Moore's work grapples with these questions of deep time and waste management, complicating the timeline of objects, and proposing that we ponder the past, present and future simultaneously."

 - Dave Dyment

1. Moore has hinted at this notion of discreet anthropomorphism in The Memory of Things and Memory Bathing, with works that feature USB “thumb” drives co-mingling with organics such as sticks, fingers, and breasts. 

2. William Gibson coined the term ‘cyberspace’ while walking in Vancouver with his first portable cassette player. He remarked that the “Sony Walkman has done more to change human perception than any virtual reality gadget. I can’t remember any technological experience since that was quite so wonderful as being able to take music and move it through landscapes and architecture.”

3. Signed by director Spike Lee and gifted to film critic Gene Siskel, Radio Raheem’s prop boombox is now in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

4. The transistor radio was the precursor to the boombox and it’s modest cousin the portable tape player. Released in the 1950s, it quickly became the most popular electronic communication device of next two decades. Billions were manufactured, with most presumably now occupying space in landfill sites. The boombox offered new levels of autonomy and control: freedom from the narrow playlists of broadcast radio, the ability to record yourself, and to fast-forward and rewind. Boombox historian Lyle Owerko noted that “Whatever a person’s employment of the pause button was used for, its main purpose was to hold the flow of time.”

Laura Moore (b.1979) is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in sculpture. Moore works primarily in stone, although her practice extends into drawing, wood, mould-making and textiles. In recent years, her work has been extensively exhibited across Canada and Europe. Notable exhibitions and outdoor public installations include Memories of the Future, a mid-career solo retrospective at McIntosh Gallery, London, ON (2025), Soft Internet Theory at the Art Gallery of Guelph (2025), Picture Stones in Bergen, Norway (2024), Love Languages at Art Windsor Essex, Windsor (2024), Erratic Behaviour at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery in Kitchener (2024), Memory Bathing at OpenArt Biennale, Örbero, Sweden (2022) and Memory Sticks at Baneheia & Odderøya, Kristiansand, Norway (2022). The artist is a transient member of Studio Pescarella in Pietrasanta, Italy and recently attended the USF Verftet residency in Bergen, Norway in 2024. She received an MFA from York University and a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Her work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Fanshawe College, Royal Bank of Canada, the Bank of Montreal, TD Bank, Equitable Bank, RIMOWA, Bell Canada and numerous private collections.

Zalucky Contemporary is at 3044 Dundas Street West, in Toronto. They are open Thursday to Saturday, 12 - 5 pm, or by appointment. For more information, visit the gallery website, here.