SEE, DADDY? I TOLD YOU THIS WAS HEAVEN
Exhibition Dates: FEBRUARY 7 to FEBRUARY 25, 2024
Public Reception: FEBRUARY 9, 2024, 5PM
Lizardman, still in felted wool and hand-beaded costume, Scuttlehole, Ontario, 2023EXHIBITION STATEMENT: This work begins with the truth that the land shapes the people. Our discomfort with the inevitability of this fact is highlighted by the placement of characters within seemingly isolated natural environments; the chaos that emerges from this is where the story begins. In my teens, I would visit an abandoned theme park, Storyland. It was full of animatronic characters from fables that no longer worked. My friends and I would get drunk and stoned and eventually run around the park and engage with the sculptures. We used these campy, over abundant puppets and worlds as rehearsal: to learn how to be humans in the way we were taught to do. While some find the alternate realities presented by the inevitable power of the landscapes threatening, there are those who find this freeing. Queer bodies that don’t ‘fit’ with traditional fabulations are prone to body dysmorphia. These bodies may find freedom in being presented with alternate realities, and self-determination in their ability to choose among them. This series has used the aesthetic power of water to manipulate perception, represent a portal, or an explicit choice among realities. While chaos ensues for normal working class settlers in rural landscapes, queer bodies find amore honest thriving. Through the forced connection to a Lizardman, a Woman character experiences metamorphosis in a reflection of imposed perceptions of body and being. It is the land that shapes the people.
KELSEY DAWN PEARSON was born in Kjipuktuk/Halifax in the early 1990s and moved to Napanee, Ontario when they were starting grade school. They returned to Kjipuktuk/Halifax as an adult where they received their BFA from NSCAD University. They then moved to Tiohtia:ke/Montreal where they completed an MFA in Print Media at Concordia University. They recently returned to Ontario where they reside in Katarokwi/Kingston. They have exhibited their work across Canada, in the US and Ireland. Pearson is the 2023 recipient of the Nan Yeomans Grant for Artistic Development.
MISTAKEN POINT
Exhibition Dates: JANUARY 10 to FEBRUARY 3, 2024
Mistaken Point, 2019, artist book, title page view. Photo credit: Morgan Wedderspoon.Everything [there] knows how to be low, how to hug the rock and hunch against the wind. By the time you get to Mistaken Point, you will have already grown accustomed to looking down and looking closely, especially if it happens to be foggy, which is likely. You will also, probably, have had enough experience being buffeted by wind to appreciate the ecosystem’s preference for a horizontal lifestyle. — Don McKay
Initially inspired by the essay Ediacaran and Anthropocene: Poetry as a Reader of Deep Time by poet Don McKay, our collaborative project brought us to a place now known as Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve, Newfoundland and Labrador, situated on the traditional lands of the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq. Linking the evocative current day place name, Mistaken Point, to the Ediacaran extinction event recorded in its fossil records, McKay urges humankind to reorient to avoid the same fate in the so-called Anthropocene. His writing captured our imagination with its poetic and sometimes playful warning, which urges people to use their senses to connect to place differently, as fellow life forms bound by the laws of mutualism. In July 2018, with funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, we visited this place with the warning for a name and its fossil impressions of the earliest complex organisms seen on Earth. Arriving in St. John’s soon after, we met briefly with the poet himself and began our 1-month residency at St. Michael’s Printshop. Our intended medium of traditional stone lithography had other plans for us, so we embraced monoprint and the playful immediacy of inking up available surfaces and objects in an responsive, open-ended process. During that strangely hot and humid month, we turned these prints into paper sculptures: a version of a pocket-sized emergency rain poncho we found at a shop and a pair of protective booties, after the ones required to walk the eroding fossil surface at Mistaken Point. These objects hold meaning for us as interfaces between our bodies and the biosphere, while, being made of paper, they are unreliable as functional protective gear, suggesting that separation from “nature” is an illusion. Following our residency, we continued to develop the project at SNAP Printshop (amiskwaciwâskahikan-Edmonton, Alberta), creating an artist book in an unconventional format to contain the printed objects. The form of the book allowed us to bring the objects into relationship with each other, framing their meaning through text and the sequential viewing experience. It became a generative process, prompting ideas which expanded beyond the book form into the sculpture and installation elements we are exploring today. While it began in part as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the cultural phenomenon of doomsday survivalism, our ongoing collaboration raises questions about misguided responses to the climate crisis that do not address its root causes.
ANGELA SNIEDER (she/her) is an artist and educator living between Hamilton and Kingston. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the University of Alberta and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from York University. Through copper etching, photopolymer gravure and lens-based installation, her work explores the act of looking and its transformative potential, considering the role of attentive perception in shaping our sense of empathy and connection with our environment. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions in Victoria, Edmonton, Calgary and Winnipeg, and group exhibitions at sites across Canada, and in Poland, China, Egypt, USA, Russia and Finland. She has taught art in university and community settings and is currently a Consecutive Teacher Candidate at Queen’s University.
http://www.angelasnieder.com/ Instagram: @angelasnieder
MORGAN WEDDERSPOON (she/her) is a Katarokwi-Kingston based visual artist and a settler of Scottish-English descent. She maintains an arts practice in print media including book works, sculpture, installation, and participatory projects. Rooted in collection and observation practices throughout her urban environment, her work engages with the uneasiness of living in the ruins of late capitalism and the possibilities for collective change in the face of climate breakdown. She is a graduate of Queen’s University (2009) and holds a Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the University of Alberta (2016). Morgan has exhibited widely including solo exhibitions at sites such as the John & Maggie Mitchell Art Gallery, MacEwan University (Edmonton), Open Studio (Toronto), and SNAP Gallery (Edmonton) and within international group exhibitions at sites in Russia, China, Poland, USA, Scotland, and Egypt. She is an educator and community arts advocate.
http://www.morganwedderspoon.com Instagram: @wedderspoon
Protective Booties, 2019, sewn paper sculpture (monoprint, thread). Photo credit: Morgan Wedderspoon.AGATA DERDA
September 6 to October 6, 2023. Reception Sep 8th, 5-8pm
DESPERTANDO EL ANIMO: AWAKENING THE COURAGE
Solo Exhibition Dates: Nov 17 - Feb 10, 2023
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