Image: Pinar Yoldas, Hollow Ocean, 2020, image still. Photo: courtesy of the artist.
Curated by Amber Christensen (Sherwood Village Branch Manager), Stacey Fayant (Independent curator), Tomas Jonsson (Curator of Moving Image and Performance), and Wendy Peart (Curator of Education and Community Outreach)
Featuring works by Christina Battle, Naomi Bebo, Andrea Carlson, Ruth Cuthand, Nicole Dextras, Jude Griebel, Jill Ho-You, Rachelle Viader Knowles, David Opdyke, Geoffrey Pugen, Rolande Souliere, Mkrtich Tonoyan, Jeff Wizniak, Pinar Yoldas, and Sylvia Ziemann.
The end of the world has been a human preoccupation for countless millennia. The exhibition States of Collapse, which spans both Central and Sherwood Galleries, features artists who explore the unimaginable complexity of a cataclysmic crisis. Originally developed in 2019, this exhibition did not foresee the pandemic of 2020 and beyond, but coincidently echoes lived experiences endured globally. The work in States of Collapse reflects on our response to a radical change to the world as we know it and challenges us to collectively consider our impact on global well-being.
Essay ↑
The Anthroposcenic Route
By Cindy Baker
The end of the world has been bearing down on us since the beginning, coming to a head in all sorts of ways. Humans have caused an acceleration of this end, have caused many smaller ends, have imagined and created novel ways for our world to end than nature could have come up with on her own. Though I’m not sure we could have accurately predicted which of all our contemporary catastrophes might have hit us first, scientists have been ringing the alarm bells about the global pandemic we find ourselves in for many years, saying we've been overdue and underprepared. The current pandemic is one of many ways in which the world is collapsing, has collapsed, will collapse, and there are many more situations that we’re overdue and underprepared for.
Of all the hundreds of ways we’ve been warned that the world might end: plagues and disease, wars, nuclear disasters, rising sea levels, environmental collapse, biological terrorism, technological collapse, artificial intelligence run amok, and so many more, one of the most realistic (and perhaps reassuring) assessment is the one which contends that we cannot yet fathom the thing that will become our ultimate undoing. Each of these calamities feels too easy to imagine. We have imagined them, again and again, in our stories, our movies and books. Each of these have ended neatly, if not happily, with a conclusion of one kind or another that we are there to witness, feel resolution for, and move on with our lives.
And besides, if they were real, why aren't we doing more to prepare for their arrival, or stopping the things we’re doing which will eventually lead to them? So many of the potential ends of the world could be avoided or held off by relatively simple acts, we are told. It’s clear that we don’t all agree about which are more important catastrophes to fend off, which are most realistic, which more pressing, which are more devastating. We live with these disasters in the now, as potentialities, anxieties and fears, not in the future. For some, we live with them as memories, as aftershocks, as the reality we move through daily. The real questions we and our leaders grapple with are which apocalypses would be most cost-effective to deal with, which lifestyle changes would be easier to adopt and maintain, get us re-elected, cause the least disruption to our lives, or would most likely be adopted by enough people, governments, and corporations as to have a fighting chance of working.
Because these various apocalypses have been on our horizon for generations, with the most recent generations never knowing a time when we weren’t anticipating the end of the world in our lifetimes as a realistic potential, there is no shortage of cultural production concerned with the end of the world. Living and working amidst a global pandemic, however, gives artists an opportunity to understand catastrophe in revealing ways.
Thinking about the end of the world needn’t be a nihilistic/pessimistic/hand-wringing/catastrophizing/exercise; to imagine a potential future is to help dispel fear of the unknown. Some of these impending apocalypses feel like the earth resetting; there may be some comfort in thinking that the deaths of many could be in the service of the survival of the species or of the future of the planet. Some feel like a total obliteration, in which case there may be consolation in imagining an end to pain and suffering; there is nothing to mourn if no one is left to mourn it. Some ends herald new beginnings, some traditions believe in transformations rather than ends, some origin stories begin with the conclusion of another. Pinar Yoldas’ life forms emerge in a post-apocalyptic fever dream; the (very real) Great Pacific Garbage Patch becoming the imagined site of the new spark of life. Yoldas begs the question: what sorts of life forms could emerge from our shameful, thoughtless destruction of nature?
Despite boundless tragedy, nature and humanity have survived (and caused) countless ends of the world, extinctions, annihilations. Whole nations and races have been extinguished, or nearly so. Naomi Bebo’s sumptuously detailed and intricately beaded Apocalyptic Woodland Child imagines a civilization that has not only survived the end of the world, but is thriving despite environmental disaster and hostile living situations. Here, the mask is not only for survival but also for ceremonial use, for a culture that understands destruction as cyclical. Compare this to Ruth Cuthand’s painting She Went to Town. Cuthand is most well known for her work about diseases that ravage/d First Nations populations, and the role that colonialism has played in their spread. She Went to Town is an older and perhaps less pointed work, but its inclusion in this exhibition asks us to consider how Canadian First Nations populations exist not in an imagined but a real post-apocalyptic world; what people must wear and how they must move to survive in this landscape which is hostile to their existence.
Indigenous oral traditions have mapped global disasters for tens of thousands of years; these stories provide tools for navigating the apocalypse, and confidence that it does not mark the end. The animals in Christina Battle’s Off This Spinning Rock are given the power to escape the earth’s imminent destruction by man in a cautionary tale that suggests some beings, with the right knowledge, might survive even the most catastrophic of outcomes. Through the implication that the colonizer, as a consuming machine, is incapable of forging its own path, Andrea Carlson’s Apocalypse Domani proposes that it is Indigenous peoples who are better equipped for survival.
Some of the work in the exhibition addresses the current COVID-19 pandemic directly; their works are relatable in a very straightforward way. Rolande Souliere’s A day’s life during Covid depicts and absurd attempt by the artist to stake out her personal bubble of safety, making visible the difficulty of navigating a world filled with invisible danger and people who may not be taking those dangers seriously.
One disappointing thing the pandemic has taught us, in case we didn’t already know, is that even in a global emergency we can’t seem to agree on the best course of action enough to head off death in large-scale numbers. In VacZineNations! Rachelle Viader Knowles and Mkrtich Tonoyan challenge students and artists to confront vaccine hesitancy and offer solutions for public vaccine education that recognize a multiplicity of cultural contexts impacting individuals’ decisions to decline vaccination.
The tragicomedy of David Opdyke’s videos further highlight humanity’s role in our own destruction. IT’S NOT OUR FAULT, reads the banner trailing behind the plane on the scenic postcard depicting the Statue of Liberty in Nothing to See Here, moments before (and then after) it is destroyed, to a soundtrack of contemporary American politicians sputtering excuses for the current state of affairs.
Jude Griebel’s anthropomorphic dystopian landscapes show us inescapable disasters in which the landscape-creatures march mindlessly to their own demise, reminding us of our own paradoxical relationship between culpability and denial, responsibility for what we have wrought and the need to turn away form it in order not to be overwhelmed with grief. Similarly, the animals in Sylvia Ziemann’s work have taken the place of humans in a post-apocalyptic world. Instead of righting our wrongs or learning from our mistakes, however, they’re condemned to repeat them, replicating our hubris and anxieties towards their inevitable doom. Through the fetishization of the natural world, Nicole Dextras’ work employs all manner of flora to create ceremonial garments and accoutrements; in her post-apocalyptic world, there is more hope, but it’s premised on the notion that only nature might save us from ourselves.
There is no one to save us from ourselves in Jill Ho-You’s In the Dust, which shows a series of buildings crumbling into nothingness. Though there are hints of nature reappearing in the form of immature roots and seedlings, the structures seem to disappear into a black void, as if not only has humanity been stripped away from the earth, but the earth itself is gone. In its place, clouds float silently in the inky black of space, and roots search for soil to plant themselves in as the last remnants of humanity quietly break apart. Meanwhile, Geoffrey Pugen’s and Jeff Wizniak’s photographic work plant us firmly within the here and now of our dystopic landscape. Reflecting real-life evidence of our crumbling creations, their images remind us that hubris is one of the most worrisome symptoms of our impending destruction, and that humility and self-awareness will be just as important as knowledge and technology in our potential salvation.
Living in the midst of a global pandemic has brought many fears to bear, but is providing us a unique perspective on cultural anxieties; knowledge is the enemy of fear. Those fears and cultural anxieties that we have encountered in the face of this global disaster have given way to certainties. As fears are realized, their unknowns dissolve; some anxieties are abated, and some unimagined realities come to life in ways that help us understand the world and ourselves a little more, for better and for worse.
Cindy Baker is a contemporary artist based in Western Canada whose work engaging with queer, gender, disability, fat, and art discourses draws upon 25 years working and organizing in her communities. Baker has exhibited and performed across Canada and internationally, and continues to maintain volunteer leadership roles across her communities.
Installation Images ↑
Photos by Don Hall
