Jenine Marsh: New Wishes

Working across sculpture and installation, Canadian artist Jenine Marsh explores materials tied to exchange and circulation. Coins recur throughout her practice, undergoing processes of change that question how value is established and experienced in everyday life.

new wishes. is Marsh’s first solo institutional presentation in the UK and centres on a large-scale fountain built within the gallery space. The structure appears in a state of transition and may read as under construction, out of service, or in decline. Developed in dialogue with the Pavilion’s modernist architecture and its role as a civic space, the fountain draws on the familiar form of the wishing well, where private hopes are expressed through a small public act. Here, wishing helps us to see how hopes for a better world persist despite the current conditions of capitalism in the early 21st Century.

The coins used in the exhibition are bronze counterfeits, cast using a lost-wax process and electroplated to resemble circulated currency. Altered through squashing, folding, or piercing, they no longer function as money in a conventional sense. Instead, they bear traces of handling and use, highlighting how value is assigned and enacted — and what remains once money no longer functions as currency.

Taxidermy pigeons are positioned within the installation, around the fountain and across the gallery. Familiar figures in urban environments, they act as quiet messengers, recalling their long presence in human society while pointing to histories of labour, neglect, and survival shaped by capitalist development of the world around us. Dependent on human waste and transient spaces, the pigeons mirror lives sustained through what is left behind. Alongside them, fragments of urban debris such as receipts, junk mail, and newspapers are embedded within the structure and scattered across the gallery floor, situating the work within the traces of daily exchange.

Marsh’s coins appear within the fountain itself, accumulating slowly and unevenly. Acting as points of contact, they carry associations of both hope and exchange. Together, the fountain and coins create a space that moves between stillness and activity, linking the simple act of making a wish to broader material conditions of life and how value circulates.

All works are courtesy of the artist and Cooper Cole, Toronto.

Jenine Marsh (b. 1984, Calgary, Alberta, Canada) has exhibited her sculpture and installation work widely in galleries and institutions such as the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Ontario (2025), the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, New York (2025); the Goldfarb Art Gallery, Toronto (2024); Ensemble, New York (2024); Prairie, Chicago (2024); Ashley, Berlin (2024); the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver (2024); Gianni Manhattan, Vienna (2023); Union Pacific, London (2023); Cooper Cole, Toronto (2023); Joe Project, Montreal (2023); Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); Essex Flowers, New York (2020); Franz Kaka, Toronto (2019); Centre Clark, Montreal (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019), Entrée Gallery, Bergen (2018), and Lulu, Mexico City (2015). She has served as artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts (2009, 2010, and 2022), at AiR Bergen at USF Verftet, Bergen (2018); Rupert, Vilnius (2017); and the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson VT (2011). Marsh’s work has received funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, Partners in Art, the Chalmers Arts Fellowship, the Toronto Arts Council, and the Ontario Arts Council. Jenine received her BFA from the Alberta University of the Arts in 2007, and her MFA from the University of Guelph in 2013. She is currently a doctoral candidate at York University.