Nearshore
sound installation, 30 min., 2026Nearshore is a multi-channel sound installation exploring the ever shifting boundary between Toronto/Mnjikaning/Tkarón:to and Lake Ontario/Niigaani-gichigami/Oniatarí:io. Blending environmental data and acoustic ecology, it approaches the shoreline as a dynamic zone of exchange and negotiation.
I arrived in Toronto shortly before the beginning of the pandemic, and began tuning in to the place I now call home through listening and recording. Walking around the waterfront, I heard local birds and animals for the first time, and they sounded almost extraterrestrial to me. As I learned more about shoreline’s evolution, I began to notice traces of history embedded in the landscape.
I live on land marked by layers of displacement and transformation—shaped by retreating glaciers, stolen from Indigenous peoples, extended outward by the city, borrowed from the lake and defended against its return. The waterfront we know today was a lakebed just over a century ago. From landmarks left by Lake Iroquois, a larger predecessor of Lake Ontario, to maps of colonial land expropriations and recent infill projects, to datasets projecting ice cover disappearance and land erosion, flood maps and “vertical allowances”—Nearshore is my attempt at tracing the shoreline’s continuous transformation.
All sound materials were recorded around Toronto’s waterfront between 2020 and 2025 and then processed to create a layered composition, spatialized through a four-channel speaker set up. The original unprocessed field recordings are accessible via headphones and offer additional layers of detail.
This work is an invitation to attune to the soundtrack of our evolving shoreline, an interface and a site of convergence and friction between many beings. Nearshore offers an audio map, reminding us that the boundary between city and lake is a temporary arrangement.
Event details here