by Chelsea Hopper.

It’s the modern-day equivalent of seeing hair floating on water: a shoe washed up on a shoreline. While both function as signs of death, the latter reads differently. It implies a narrative. An absence. A body no longer attached. And it is this fragment that becomes the catalyst for Isabel Bereczky’s solo exhibition Outsole at Light Works.
        Walking into the space as the final leg of a three-day art history conference at the other end of town, the shift in register is immediate. The gallery space is part of a somewhat hidden multipurpose venue, accessed through a nondescript door on Murray Street beneath a former Hubbard Dianetics centre, which leads to a narrow concrete passage lit by a long strip of fluorescents. Exposed pipes and scuffed walls. The descent feels less like entering a gallery than stepping into the building’s underside, its basement corridors and storage spaces. It is a fitting prelude to a show concerned with what resurfaces.
        The exhibition is pared back and entirely specific. The timber lengths, either tilted or tightly propped between the gallery walls, read at first as a formal exercise in restraint. It recalls the Minimalism of John McCracken’s leaning planks, Richard Serra’s plates, and even Bruce Nauman’s claustrophobic 1969 Performance Corridor. The planks insist on a single object, isolating it, pinning it in place, holding the viewer’s attention on what is caught between them: the sneaker. Across the gallery’s brightly lit space, four sneakers are trapped between two planks of western red cedar, snagged or wedged along their clean horizontal beams or angled into steep diagonals.
        Up close, the sneakers feel oddly particular. The Reebok Answer 13 sits suspended at eye level, a men’s size 13, chunky and padded, its white leather creased and slightly soiled, the shoelaces hanging in loose, uneven loops. The Nike Flyknit Free RN, by contrast, looks almost weightless, a grey woven skin stretched over a clean white sole, the black swoosh crisp against its mesh, the tip jammed between the beams closest to the ground. It’s the kind of running shoe my dad’s friends wear daily. The New Balance 3090 V2 is the most visually charged. All electric blue and black honeycomb panelling, punctuated with neon green, revealed as the left shoe, size 11.5, it hangs upside down, with its laces knotted and left to trail below the timber beams, dangling in loose loops like seaweed. Its right counterpart is wedged opposite it, tilting upward at a sharp diagonal, its tongue slack, the sole turned outward and fully visible. Like any shoe, it is engineered for movement, built around the promise of propulsion. Here, Bereczky stalls that promise. The shoes remain suspended, snagged, and held along the cedar’s clean lines.



It is only upon reading the exhibition text that the sneakers lose their neutrality. They are not simply found objects but stand-ins for shoes recovered from the Salish Sea coastline in British Columbia between 2007 and 2018. The text lists their dates of discovery: 26 August 2007, 7 February 2016, 12 February 2016, 20 September 2018.
        The shoe models, down to their sizes, sit within a longer chronology of more than twenty sneakers discovered since 2007, each containing disarticulated human feet. Investigation remains ongoing. I continue reading: “Approximately half of the sneakers (feet) have been forensically linked to reported missing persons. Of those on display, DNA matches to missing persons remain private or inconsistent across reports.” This phrasing is blunt, almost procedural. So, what, then, are we to make of their reappearance here, against the backdrop of another Commonwealth coastline?
        What travels here is not the ocean but narrative. Like the teenage murder at the centre of the final chapter in Chris Kraus’s recent novel, The Four Spent the Day Together, the event itself remains elsewhere, mediated through documentation, testimony, and reconstruction. In Outsole, the violence is similarly displaced. The body does not arrive, only the object. Yet where Kraus works through fictional retelling, reworking the true-crime genre itself, Bereczky holds close to evidence. Dates, models, sizes. The effect is not catharsis but a confronting proximity where the work insists that what has been recovered cannot be smoothed into story. Instead, Bereczky refuses to narrativise the sneakers into anything satisfying or resolute for the viewer.
        Working with such forensic residue, I am reminded of Francis Carmody’s project Lost & Found Recovery (2022), in which the artist set out to return fifteen lost hats to their owners. Carmody mobilised an absurd but telling range of expertise, consulting a police detective, a psychic, a DNA scientist, and an ITVSN salesperson, as though each hat might be decoded like a crime-scene artefact.
        Bereczky’s sneakers also elicit the work of Morag Keil, an artist who collects abandoned or misplaced footwear for her large wall sculpture Clock. With each iteration, Keil gathers a different set of shoes from its immediate surroundings, and so the work shifts with location, its composition determined by what has been left behind. Sporadically arranged in a circle, the shoes are repurposed as numerals in a surreal dial that operates as a functioning clock. Their worn soles and wrinkled leather operate almost indexically, recording the many steps taken before separation from their wearer, of unknown lives.
        In Outsole, however, this logic is fixed rather than contingent. Bereczky’s sneakers are not gathered locally but sourced by scouring eBay, their selection preconditioned by forensic record. Each model corresponds to a documented discovery, already tethered to a missing person. Specific makes. Specific dates. The circle of time gives way to the coastline. The shoes do not wash up here, but they arrive all the same.

Isabel Bereczky, Outsole, Light Works, 5 – 7 December 2025.

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Images: Isabel Bereczky, Outsole (Installation view), at Light Works. Photography by Scott Burton. Courtesy of the artist.