GardenShip and State
Exhibition Dates: August 23, 2024 - October 20, 2024
Opening : September 14, 2024 from 1-3 pm - including a panel talk and live participatory performance by CK artist Naty Tremblay
Join us for a local river clean-up, sponsored by the Lower Thames Valley Conservation Authority, September 14, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm.
Click here for more information on the local river clean-up
This exhibition brings together 21 artists and writers who engage in decolonial critique, environmental activism, and twenty-first century artistic practices to address what is arguably the problem of our times: environmental catastrophe. It asks how we can work together and create together as a global community to restore the planet – while respecting differences and seeking to repair divisions and address injustices brought about by colonialism.
Co-curated by Jeff Thomas and Patrick Mahon, the exhibition features a vast array of works, many produced over a two-year period and originally shown at Museum London in 2021-22. The results of conversations between the artists and writers, as well as oftentimes with members of their local communities, those artworks are being presented at the Thames Art Gallery alongside new and updated projects, offering a multi-sensory experience that inhabits the main gallery, and moves upward into the mezzanine space. Comprising textiles, photography, sculpture, video, gardening, and installation, the show invites gallery participants to see, to hear and to engage with aesthetically rich and culturally complex artworks that are simultaneously provocative and challenging –and also sources of hope.
This exhibit also features Troubled Critters & Healing Spells, a project by the local Hibernaculum Collective, which explores land and water decolonization, restoration, relationship, and reciprocity through traditional wild clay processes.
Featuring:
Ron Benner, Lori Blondeau, Sean Caulfield, Anindita Chakraborty, Paul Chartrand, Tom Cull, Amelia Fay, Michael Farnan, Joan Greer, Jamelie Hassan, Sharmistha Kar, Jessica Karuhanga, Mark Kasumovic, Patrick Mahon, Olivia Mossuto, Quinn Smallboy, Ashley Snook, Adrian Stimson, Jeff Thomas, Andres Villar, Michelle Wilson
Local Artists and Activists – Chatham Region
Amanda Blain and LTVCA, Andrea Nickerson, Naty Tremblay and the Hibernaculum Collective.
GardenShip and State Artist Panel Talk
Date: September 14, 2024 at 1:15 pm in Studio One, Chatham Cultural Centre
Artists on Panel: Jeff Thomas, Patrick Mahon, Ron Benner, Michelle Wilson
Performance by Nat Trembley from the Hibernaculum Collective
Date: September 14, 2024 at 1:40 pm in starting in Studio One of the Chatham Cultural Centre and ending in the Thames Art Gallery
Hibernaculum Collective Member, Nat Tremblay’s performance during the reception of GardenShip and State on September 14, 2024
Hibernaculum Collective: Troubled Critters & Healing Spells
Troubled Critters & Healing Spells is an ever-evolving eco-art project by the Hibernaculum Collective, a diverse group of artists, storytellers and earth workers utilizing a family farm as their base of operations. This project is included as a locally based component of the GardenShip and State exhibition, currently on view at the Thames Art Gallery, and explores land and water decolonization, restoration, relationship and reciprocity through traditional wild clay processes. The collective foraged wild clay, exploring how honourable harvest might differ from its historical use as a commodity. Gatherings and feasts were held with family and friends throughout the project to process the clay, fire their forms, and discuss what decolonization and healing the land and waters meant to them through artistic and collaborative processes
Hibernaculum Collective Members, from left to right, Andrea Nickerson, Nat Tremblay and Alia Fortune Weston, next to their project Troubled Critters & Healing Spells (Thames Art Gallery, 2024)
Corn = Life: The Power of Naming
by Ron Benner, a collaboration with Jeff Thomas, 2024.
Video by Yuluo Anita Wei
The four trellises that appear in Corn = Life: The Power of Naming, 2024, were originally part of a photographic/garden installation entitled Trans/mission: Ble d’Inde. Ron Benner installed this work in 2008 at AXENÉO7 artist-run centre in Gatineau, Quebec. Thomas was commissioned by Benner to write an essay on the importance of maize in his life and his Haudenosaunee culture. This text became a precursor to their future collaborations. In 2021, the trellises were then used again by Thomas and Benner in an installation for the exhibition GardenShip and State at Museum London, which was curated by Patrick Mahon and Jeff Thomas. The trellises were originally meant to be part of a collaboration between Benner and Thomas, involving Benner’s photographic/garden installation As The Crow Flies (2005–present) on the grounds of Museum London. Due to the pandemic this planned collaboration could not be realized and an indoor installation was created instead. In their newest collaborative work Corn = Life, the trellises have been painted to replicate the colours of the Two Row Wampum—Gaswéñdah, a living treaty that was originally ratified by the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch in 1613.
In the work shown, Jeff Thomas’ photographic panels come together in conversation with Ron Benner’s garden. The names of maize in First Nations and other languages, which appear in the work, were compiled by Benner in 1993 with the assistance of Kanatawakhon (David) Maracle (1952–2023). The plants in the installation are all native to the Americas and includes four varieties of maize (Purple Peruvian, Iroquoian Rainbow, Assiniboine Flint, and Mandan Bride), four varieties of tomatoes, four varieties of chili peppers, rattlesnake and scarlet runner beans, morning glories, zinnias, asters, petunias, flowering tobaccos, flowering sages, sweet potato vines, ageratums, portulacas, cosmos, begonias, and dahlias. The subtitle for this work borrows from a quote by the Palestinian author, Mitri Raheb –“How we name things is important.”
Corn = Life: The Power of Naming by Ron Benner, filmed by Yuluo Anita Wei on May 30, 2024.
Corn = Life: The Power of Naming by Ron Benner, filmed by Yuluo Anita Wei on July 10, 2024.
Corn = Life: The Power of Naming by Ron Benner, filmed by Yuluo Anita Wei on August 24, 2024.
