Future Geographies: Art in the Century of Climate Change
Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC - To Jan 10, 2027
The 21st century might not yet be old enough to have produced an eco-art pantheon, but there are artists and artworks that come to mind from Canada and beyond. Edward Burtynsky’s digital pictures of ravaged industrial landscapes, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s forest fire paintings and Jean Shin’s molten cellphone sculptures (Huddled Masses, 2020) have all attained go-to, showstopper status for curators hoping to speak to the climate crisis. Though all three of these artists are represented in the VAG’s show Future Geographies, it is the subtler artworks that provide this exhibition its grout.
For Future Geographies: Cosmic Cliffs (2023), LA-based Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin has cut strips from Amazon boxes and woven them into a satellite image of a star-forming region in the Carina Nebula, as captured by NASA’s James Webb Telescope. Here, the gaseous “cliffs” bring to mind mountain vistas or, when viewed through the eyes of the colonial settler, a new frontier. For Tossin, a parallel exists between space exploration and our planet’s long, disquieting history of unsustainable industrial-scale resource extraction, like that found in Brazil’s Amazon rain forest.
Another stand-out low-key work is Andrew Dadson’s House Plants (2017). First shown at Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery, House Plants consists of three potted tropical plants (in the first iteration, the plants were sourced from Craigslist), all three whitewashed with a biodegradable milk-based paint, placed on a low platform and lit with multi-coloured grow lights. Over the course of the exhibition, the growth of these plants will corrupt their coating, producing cracks, but also bright green sprouts. A hopeful eco-artwork if ever there was one.
