We Sky Water Land will always belong to the change
Saison 1 - Toronto - 2026
We Sky Water Land will always belong to the change est une série réalisée dans le cadre d’une résidence photographique de six semaines à l’Alliance Française de Toronto. Au bord du lac Ontario, la neige se retire lentement. Dans l’entre-deux des saisons, Toronto apparaît façonnée par l’eau, la lumière, la roche et la végétation. Ce travail naît de la marche, de l’attente et du retour patient sur les mêmes lieux, les images enregistrent moins des événements que des passages : une matière qui change, une lumière qui s’ouvre, une forme qui se déplace. La série invite à ralentir le regard, à percevoir ce qui persiste, se transforme et nous dépasse.
We Sky Water Land will always belong to the change is a series created during a six-week photographic residency at the Alliance Française de Toronto. On the shores of Lake Ontario, the snow slowly recedes. In the in-between of seasons, Toronto appears shaped by water, light, rock, and vegetation. This work emerges from walking, waiting, and patiently returning to the same places. Rather than recording events, the images capture passages: matter in transformation,
light opening, forms shifting. The series invites us to slow our gaze and perceive what persists, transforms, and exceeds us.


















The title of this exhibition, We Sky Water Land will always belong to the change,
is a text-based work created by smudge studio — Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse —
as part of the installation Careful Infrastructures for Reassembled Lands (2022) by Lisa Hirmer,
created as part of the Waterfront Art Residency,
with support from the Waterfront BIA and Waterfront Toronto.
smudge studio’s piece is one of four works installed along the water’s edge,
commissioned by Hirmer and inspired by the redevelopment of the Don River mouth.
The installations take the form of poetic “soft” infrastructureand invite reflection
on how we inhabit this place in relation to its human and non-human forces,
particularly in the context of the climate emergency.
Elizabeth Ellsworth, Jamie Kruse, and Lisa Hirmer generously agreed that this series could take the title of this work.










