Mia Feuer’s “Boreal,” 2013 (detail). Photo: Sue Wrbican.
Tuesday, 23 June 2015
Esker Foundation
444-1011 9 Ave SE, Calgary
6:30 PM
Free, but advance registration is suggested.
Facilitated by cheyanne turions.
Departing from the possible futures of oil production and consumption that are invoked in Mia Feuer’s solo exhibition at the Esker Foundation, Synthetic Seasons, the artist has compiled selections from articles and essays that have been instrumental in developing the project. The salon will feature excerpts from Lucy Lippard’s Undermining and Esther Leslie’s Synthetic Worlds.
Feuer is interested in the post-natural landscape, visible sites where human interaction—be it personal, social, political, or financial—has altered or is in the process of rapidly changing the land, and thus our relationship to it. Her work makes connections between our intense material dependency and the accelerated environmental impact this creates. Collapsed Soviet coalmines find common ground with bombed out buildings in the Suez Canal; trees feathered and tarred in the Athabasca Oil Sands sail alongside crystal blue glacial tongues of the Arctic Circle. Synthetic chandeliers of industrial waste mix and float among the black wings of ravens, a sky that pours down stinking pitch, an inky rink at the end of the world. Feuer stands at the centre of the storm, creating brilliant and ambitious work that calls attention to these damaged sites, but also surprisingly finds beauty and hope amidst the crushing mess.
Born in Winnipeg, Mia Feuer received a BFA from the University of Winnipeg in 2004 and an MFA in 2009 from the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. The artist currently lives and works in Oakland where she is Assistant Professor in Sculpture at the California College of the Arts.
Special thanks to the Esker Foundation for hosting this salon.
No Reading After the Internet 