HOURS
Monday to Friday
10 AM to 4 PM
Saturday & Sunday
CLOSED
CURRENT EXHIBIT
ARTIST STATEMENT
This exhibition features sculptural performance work in photo and video. My practice negotiates the relationship between my identity as a 10th generation settler, and the identity of this “country”; its extractive mission as an economical basis. This negotiation between the living being, the vulnerable being, and the animal being (which we are) attempts to develop a powerful and tangible connection to life, including with more than human beings; such as plants, water, land, animals and minerals. My body of work engages the territory where I have the privilege of experiencing life. These works are conceptually and physically situated at the headwaters of the West Credit River, in the territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, encompassed in Treaty 19 of 1818, in the small town of Hillsburgh. Some of the artworks critique extractivism using sculptural performance. The exhibition offers an overview of a new body of work, which emerged after research on Franco-Canadian legends, in which I realised that the phenomenology of legends ceased at a certain point in time. My hypothesis for this is that the violence inflicted on land and its beings, through the process and mechanisms of extraction, interrupted the land’s ability or desire to communicate. Leaf Being also comes from three focussed years of cyanotype production, during which plants were delicately wrapped to capture their presence instead of their silhouette. The negative space of the cyanotype signals presence through absence. Thus the white overexposed form of Leaf Being. These pieces focus on the environmental stakes on the territory I occupy, which are solely caused by capitalistic interests. The threats to these vulnerable ecological spaces are caused by the violence of large capital projects, which the land cannot support. One such threat is the new sewage plant which will dump in the head waters of the West Credit River, where many threatened species still exist. I aim to bring attention to the impact of extractive colonial practices and question the purely capitalistic motive for these forms of violence, and underline the absurdity of these conventions.
GALLERY WALKTHROUGH
Generously funded by