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Preservation is a word oft associated with environmental activism. However, its implementation is a distinctly “cultural” phenomenon, not a natural one. Namely, it is one of human beings, and their technologies. Preservation brings along with it a whole host of other activities. The verb implies an external process to occur in order to accomplish its goal. You have pickling, salting, fermenting, cataloguing, copying, categorizing, languaging, embalming. In reality, ruin itself is a much needed process in the activity of sustainment of diverse life. The transfer of heat from one system (biological, ecological, and, I would argue, visual, and ontological) is integral and the multiplicities of systems allows for a birth of organization in the transfer of this heat. Origin of Species by Darwin, and Kelvin’s laws of thermodynamics were published in the same decade. They both came on the tail end of the industrial revolution. Both theories were argued as paradoxical, and heretical, by the church. Both conceptually resist the possibility of a creative or intelligent design in the world. However, once you consider the closed system of thermodynamics as being one which encompasses you, the earth, the universe, this transfer of heat and its loss in the process – the movement of such energy – can still create a beautiful and complex diversity of ruin. —Brynn McNab
QUICK FLIP:
ARTIST BIOS:
SARAH DAVIDSON’s practice investigates the appeal of the weak, delicate, and otherwise diminutive, by placing it in playful parallel to other ostensibly unrelated ideas. An ongoing interest in the fragment as symbol reflects an interest in medium as gendered and maps as they exist in lived time. Past fragmentary explorations have aligned historical craft—particularly the stitching of quilts—with depictions of landscape as background.
Sarah Davidson works primarily between drawing and painting to create compositions in which shadowy, biomorphic figures and delicate, foliated fragments mingle. Making reference to a history of discourses constructing the ‘natural’ world, their works investigate bodies, environment, observation, and the tangled strings which often bind them together. While they often draw directly from ‘nature’, their drawings diffract distinctions between embodied self and other through a queer ecological lens: critters and space collapse in upon one another, suggesting a permeable web. Both the eye and the mind work towards the known–animals, plants, brush marks, lines–but are caught in a space of undoing. A question floats among the forms: who’s seeing who, and how?
Sarah Davidson (they/she, b.1989, Ottawa) lives and works in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. They have exhibited their work at Wil Aballe Art Projects (Vancouver), Feuilleton (Los Angeles), Cassandra Cassandra (Toronto), Erin Stump Projects (Toronto), Unit 17 (Vancouver), The Power Plant (Toronto), The New Gallery (Calgary), and Audain Gallery (Vancouver), among others. They were a finalist in the 2018 RBC Canadian Painting Competition, and are the recipient of awards and residencies including the Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation Grant (2021), The Banff Centre’s Late Winter BAiR (2020), and AiR Sandnes residency in Sandnes, Norway (2016). They hold a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art & Design (2015) and an MFA from the University of Guelph (2019).
BRYNN MCNAB is a writer, facilitator, and curator who specializes in event-based and social practices, publishing, and co-authorship. Her most recent projects include Co-Writing Criticism (Vancouver, Montreal and Paris), a co-authorship workshop, and An Exact Vertigo (Vancouver), an iterative contemporary dance series. She managed Unit/Pitt Projects (Vancouver) from 2013-2015, and revived and became editor-in-chief of ISSUE Magazine (Vancouver) during that time. Her poetry, essays, and short stories have been published across Canada and internationally. She attended Nova Scotia College of Art and Design for filmmaking and photography, and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University in Critical and Cultural Practices. Brynn McNab currently sits as Secretary of the Or Gallery (Vancouver) Board of Directors.
BOOK LAUNCH AND EXHIBITION:
