The Work of Wind exhibition has introduced a new installation at the Blackwood Gallery called Those at the Great River-Mouth. For the month of November, the installation will focus on “nature symbolism, territorial resistance, and solidarity economies connected to land and water.” Much like the Work of Wind, Air, Land, and Sea produced in the Industrial Southdown Area earlier this year, this exhibit zones in on environmental activism and awareness. The program informs visitors that the “two solo exhibitions by women artists trace the contours of embodiment and the agency of more-than-human worlds.”
Through a brightly coloured presentation, Carolina Caycedo displays the results of an investigation “of hydroelectric sites across Latin America, whose processes of land expropriation and environmental licensing have been marked by unprecedented environmental disasters and profound Indigenous resistance.” The piece displays water’s living and life-giving capacities as Caycedo’s work “affirms nature’s vibrancy beyond the narrow resource-driven logics of extractivism.” When you walk into the room, projected images of waterfalls and rivers are “mirrored, altered and remixed to create a series of what the artist calls Water Portraits.” These portraits “conjure bodies of water as living entities.” They stand to represent the active political agents in environmental conflicts instead of resources for human extractivism.
Long snake-like cushions adorn the floor, inviting visitors to sprawl across them and get comfortable. The exhibit, which can be found in the Blackwood Gallery, invites students and faculty to come explore environmental issues in different parts of the world. Caycedo calls visitors to acknowledge human intervention in previously undisturbed bodies of water and spheres across Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia. Environmentalists ask us “to revise and decolonize our contemplative and utilitarian relationships towards landscape.” In doing so, we will address the issues presented in Caycedo’s exhibition Those at the Great River-Mouth. The program describes the images of flowing water unfolding as they “transform and mutate.” They do so “until it [the body of water] constitutes a new disposition which looks back and speaks to us.” A typical interaction with the exhibit can be described as transcendent, bringing its visitors into an entirely new social and political sphere. “These new configurations of rivers and bodies of water are intended to expand the visual and mental space, where water generates its own form, face, and its own particular voice,” writes Caycedo in the exhibit brochure.
Those at the Great River-Mouth runs at the Blackwood Gallery until December 1.
