BioCurious at the AGW

Art Gallery of Windsor, March 14 - Oct 1, 2023

BioCurious brings together works by eighteen artists whose works explore living materials as their subject matter, and in some cases, their artistic medium. Curated in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and impacts of climate change, the exhibition asks pressing questions about how we have impacted the world we inhabit and how this changing world, marred by our draining of its resources, has shaped our existence. How do we create definitions of culture that include biological culture? In what ways are bodies and objects co-created with nature, during the cycle of life? How can art help us understand how the human body is permeable to, and comprised of, other life forms, and inherently connected to – not detached from – the land? How can contemporary art help us understand the genre of “landscape” more expansively? How might art depict  our biological futures? What changes must happen now to heal the land, our bodies, and the places we call home?

Sitting at the intersection of art and science, the works in this exhibition focus on humanity’s relationship to the elements—water, plant life, and the air that we breathe—and how this relationship has morphed through trade and resource extraction. The selected artists, who identify as Canadian and/or Indigenous, intertwine scientific and cultural knowledge to propose different ways of understanding living bodies and the land.

Artists:

Siku Allooloo, Alana Bartol, Christi Belcourt, Daphne Boyer, Hannah Claus, Nicole Clouston, Becky Comber, Ruth Cuthand, Lisa Hirmer, Charmaine Lurch, Laura Magnusson, Maria Simmons, Kara Springer, Laura St. Pierre, Jennifer Wanner, Amanda White, Jennifer Willet and Xiaojing Yan.

Curated by Jennifer Matotek & Julie Rae Tucker

March 2023

Western News Article! 

Link to PDF
 

Dec 2022

Rooted in the Region: Agriculture and the Arts in Southwestern Ontario

Sunday 18 September 2022, 2-5pm
Blyth Festival Theatre’s Harvest Stage
FREE shuttle bus to and from the event, departing from and returning to Western University
This event is FREE and open to the public. RSVP by 5 September 2022 is required.
RSVP HERE

Sept 2022

^{CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS: Assembling Recipes for Sustainability}

LINK TO SIGN UP 

Calling all artists, writers, activists, scholars, organizers, visionaries, and revolutionaries: we invite you to contribute to a collective recipe box project through the mail. Let us inspire each other with our ideas, DIY solutions, creative or speculative imaginings, practical tips, inherited strategies, poetic responses and plans for sustaining our work in (the) art world(s).

Participants are invited to contribute a ‘recipe’ for sustainability – with ‘recipe’ to be interpreted as literally or as creatively as desired. These recipes will be submitted on an index card and the collection of cards will be assembled in a recipe box.

There is no cost to participate, and all participants will be provided with a self-addressed stamped envelope and a card to submit their recipe. In exchange for contribution, participants will receive a copy of the entire collection.

This collective mail art project is curated by the Centre for Sustainable Curating’s inaugural postdoctoral fellows, Drs. Amanda White and Zoë Heyn-Jones. “Assembling Recipes for Sustainability” is a component of “Imagining The Centre For Sustainable Curating,” the CSC’s year-long visioning exercise to imagine, collaborate, and discuss the ways we can take seriously the goal of the Centre to be sustainable in all ways: that is, sustainable in teaching about best ecological practices for exhibition making, sustainable in how we might engage with the world around us, and sustainable in the outcomes built through our efforts. “Imagining The Centre For Sustainable Curating” is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

April 2022

Exhibition: From Remote Stars: Buckminster Fuller, London, and Speculative Futures

Museum London
March 5 to May 15, 2022

Museum London link 

Remote Stars Podcast and Exhibition Website

March 2022

Public 64: Beyond unsettling 

Collaborative work with Brad Isaacs included in this issue of Public Journal, edited by Leah Decter and Carla Tauton.

Link to Issue

“The artworks, conversations and texts in PUBLIC 64: Beyond Unsettling offer innovative perspectives in non-consumptive, collaborative, ethical, and accountable, arts-based approaches to undoing colonial dominance. The issue is 264 pages in length, full-colour, with a wrap-around cover by Afuwa.”

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Jan 2022

Some Instructions for Folding Perception

S𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘐𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘍𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘗𝘦𝘳𝘤𝘦𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, written to accompany the exhibition:
𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘵⁣, Tyler Los-Jones, On now (Nov 19 - Jan 8, 2022) at Norberg Hall Gallery in Calgary, AB.  Risograph print was designed with/by Tyler Los Jones and printed by Yolkless press. Copies printed in a variety of colors and available at the gallery, and a plain text version online, on the gallery website: https://norberghall.com/tyler-los-jones-the-knots-of-the-net/

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Do Roses Dream of Freedom?

 (link to text pdf): Do Roses Dream of Freedom?
An essay to accompany Waard Ward’s floristry project, as part of the exhibition Public Space, Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, 2021. PDF available on The VAC website in English and Arabic. Translation by Talal Baranbo, https://www.vac.ca/waard-ward

“Waard Ward is: Abd Al-Mounim, Hanen Nanaa, Petrina Ng, Laura Ritacca, and Patricia Ritacca. Waard Ward is a collaborative, social practice project that invites newcomers to train as florists and imagine social-entrepreneurial futures.  Collectively led by Syrian florist Abd Al-Mounim, community organizer Hanen Nanaa, educator Laurie Ritacca, curator/educator Patricia Ritacca, and artist Petrina Ng, Waard Ward collaborates in floral arrangement, decolonial research, and newcomer community building. Waard Ward's name proposes the idea of a diasporic flower district; "waard" is a romanization of the Arabic word for flower.” 

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The Botanical Turn

Image: Zachari Logan, "Nel Mezzo Del Cammi Di Nosta Vita (The Gate)" 2018 (detail). Courtesy of the artist and Paul Petro Contemporary Art.

_{The Botanical Turn}

_{McIntosh Gallery at Western University} 

_{September 23 - December 11, 2021}

Carrie Allison, Paul Chartrand, Joscelyn Gardner, Zachari Logan, Sarah Maloney, Amanda White, and ZOFF
Curated by Helen Gregory

_{Panel Discussion}

_{Co-presented by McIntosh Gallery & the Art Now! Speakers' Series}

_{October 7, 2021, 7:00 pm EST on Zoom
Register here}

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Missing Pages 

Missing Pages

A Community centered series of online projects, Fall 2021
Presented by BRIDGE Centre for Architecture + Design and Cambridge Art Galleries | Idea Exchange

Reading group on Oct 27th:
https://www.missingpages.space/amanda-white

Fall 2021

SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2021-23

I am thrilled to share that I am a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the new Centre for Sustainable Curating, in the Department of Visual Art at Western University.

sutainablecurating.ca

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June, 2021

Artists Talk, Nipissing University 

October 08, 2020

Plant Encounters

Collaborative work with Brad Isaacs, for a digital project, curated by the Long Walk Collective; Plant Encounters, is online publication hosted by the Long Walk Collective, in the traditional territories of the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in, also known as Yukon’s Klondike. 

August, 2020-2021

A Matter of Taste 

Koffler Digital - Group Exhibition,
Online: Aug 18-Nov 30 

https://koffler.digital/a-matter-of-taste/

Aug 18 -Nov 30, 2020

Garden Relations: Plants + Humans, Gardens and Community,

Web talk on Aug 18 @ 7pm (PT)

Aug 18, 2020

Infinite Silences  

A Conversation with Elysia French about some of my recent work  recently published in the Summer 2020 Issue #51 of Antennae, The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture: Vegetal Entaglements.
“This issue of Antennae is the first of three instalments entirely dedicated to plants in art and culture.”

See link for open access:  http://www.antennae.org.uk/

Summer 2020

We Dug Through a Mountain of Gold to Find You
Amanda White & Brad Isaacs

Factory Media Centre, July 1 -31, Hamilton, ON

Screening online and in the Factory Media Centre (FMC) window space as part of the Public Works series.

https://www.factorymediacentre.ca/public-works/

July 1-31 2020

The Old Woman and the Sea Reading Group at Forest City Callery

Forest City Gallery is facilitating an online Reading Group, which will take place on June 4th, 2020.  Registered participants recieved a copy of the book to read and the event will offer a shared online space to collectively discuss the newly edited novel.

https://forestcitygallery.com/event/rewriting-wild-reading-group-0

May 2020