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Jessica Houston Suspended in a Sunbeam

Vernissage:  Thursday February 7 at 6 pm
Exhibition:  February 8 to March 2, 2019
Talk: Thursday February 28 at 6:30 pm

The McClure Gallery is pleased to present Suspended in a Sunbeam, which features mixed-media works that span Jessica Houston’s decade-long engagement with the Canadian North. Houston explores the complex ecosystems of the Arctic, including its history of colonialization, current territorial claims, and climate change. Fragments coalesce in the gallery – colours of soil, a photograph of an abandoned trading post, a charred piece of wood emitting sounds – to emphasize the active power of materials. Earth itself fills the gallery, and our relationship to land, territory and matter is called into question.

Included in this exhibition is a projection of ‘Qausuittuq ᖃᐅᓱᐃᑦᑐᖅ’ | ‘Place with No Dawn,’. This time-lapse video was created with two cameras facing an Arctic landscape. The split screen images extend the horizon and refer to the deportation of people from the two distinct Northern Québec and Baffin communities to assert Canadian sovereignty during the Cold War. Using photography and painting, The Color of Soil points to our extractive measures of relating to the earth, both in terms of resources to exploit and knowledge to acquire, it also offers a view of land as living, full of processes and embedded memory.

Suspended in a Sunbeam offers a space to engage with the histories through which ecologies are made and unmade – a space of solidarity with the ‘non-human’ that evokes another soil under the ground of land grabs, where a self-organizing earth stirs.

JESSICA HOUSTON’s multimedia projects elicit nature/culture entanglements. She has worked with communities in Iceland, the Canadian Arctic and Antarctica for a decade considering questions of ecology and sustainability. She has created site-specific works for the New Jersey MOCA, Asbury Park, New Jersey; the Castello di Corigliano, Puglia, Italy; Governors Island, NY, NY; and The Albany Airport, Albany, NY. Select exhibitions include Art Mûr Gallery, Montréal, Canada; The Hyde Collection Museum, Glens Falls, NY; and The Latimer House Museum, New York, NY. Her works are funded by The Canada Council for the Arts and are in the collections of La collection Prêt d’œuvres d’art, Musée National Des Beaux-Arts du Québec; Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ), Bank of Montréal, Toronto; and the Consulate General of Monaco, Montréal.

Read a review of this show on esse+arts

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