Explore Written on the Earth

Written on the Earth. L-R: Patrick Mahon, Matthew Trueman, Hannah Claus. March 4 to April 17, 2021 at McIntosh Gallery.

Beneath menacing black storm clouds, a funnel cloud forms. It snakes towards the earth and makes explosive contact, leaving a trail of destruction and scarring the earth with a calligraphy writ at colossal scale. Swathes of fallen trees are at once exquisite and horrifying, the trunks flattened into swirling, turbulent patterns that document the movement of the tornado as it traces its way across the land. In the eyes of scientists, this damage provides a source of data that demands analysis. As Timothy Morton writes in Being Ecological, “Data simply means what is given. It’s the plural form of the supine of the Latin dare, to give: aspects of things that are given to us when we observe them.” When presented with data, how do different disciplines respond to what has been given?

Science and art are often positioned as operating across a divide where experimentation and rational analysis and poeticized engagements that favour affect typify respective and seemingly opposing orientations. Such a reductive binary fails to recognize the existence of a much more complex and imbricated field of relations involving science and art where practitioners must ultimately invest in understanding a common and commonly challenged world.

Written on the Earth is an interdisciplinary exhibition with its catalyst in an invitation to a group of artists from the Northern Tornadoes Project, a research team at Western Engineering. Committed to charting the increasingly important evidence of tornadoes throughout Canada, the Northern Tornadoes Project involves data collection and analysis directed towards myriad objectives. The invitation presents the opportunity for artists Hannah Claus, Patrick Mahon, Ellen Moffat, Joel Ong, Eeva Siivonen, and Matthew Trueman to respond to data arising from a specific area of environmental research and to consider how they can contribute to interdisciplinary engagements with pressing contemporary issues, particularly related to the environment, global warming, human/non-human ecologies, and Indigenous views on land and stewardship.

A forthcoming exhibition catalogue will include essays by Helen Gregory and Paige Hirschey and creative writing from Lindsay Dawn Dobbin.

RESOURCES

EXHIBITION WALK-THROUGH

Take a look inside McIntosh Gallery’s most recent exhibition Written on the Earth with this virtual exhibition walk-through.

EXHIBITION PANEL DISCUSSION

Featuring Hannah Claus, Patrick Mahon, Ellen Moffat, Joel Ong, Eeva Siivonen, Matthew Trueman, and Dr. Greg Kopp. Moderated by McIntosh Gallery Curator Dr. Helen Gregory.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

McIntosh Gallery acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through its The Museums Assistance Program (MAP), the Canada Council for the Arts through its Assistance to Art Museums and Public Galleries Program, the Ontario Arts Council, the London Arts Council, Western University, Foundation Western, and our members and donors.