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Mackenzie

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Review

**Greta Hamilton** is a writer and artist working between Toronto and rural British Columbia. They are an editor of _Silverfish Magazine_.

As I write this in the haze of late summer, I realize it will be months before this review reaches the public. By then, we’ll be in the darkness of winter across so-called Canada. For now, though, the days are long and hot, the sun red against polluted skies as wildfires blaze across vast territories. It’s a crisis, a climate emergency that will be made more palatable by winter’s cold. In the veil of urgency that summer brings, I wonder what can be done to rectify this disaster.

Diane Borsato and Amish Morrell’s _Outdoor School_ (2021) offers an encouraging vision of artistic and pedagogical responses to climate change. The book is a survey of contemporary Environmental Art that emphasizes learning through land-based practices. The projects in _Outdoor School_ include Borsato and Morrell’s curatorial practice under the same name, performances and exhibitions by FASTWÜRMS, BUSH Gallery, Sameer Farooq, Ayumi Goto, and Jamie Ross, among others; a standout essay by Karen Houle on the ethics of education and farming; and a conversation between Jen Delos Reyes, Borsato, and Morrell that illuminates the editors’ pedagogical practice. The book is a counterpoint to the grief and uncertainty of climate change. It assembles a collection of artist projects and interventions that inspire reciprocity and commitment to our lived environments through multidirectional knowledge sharing. Each project emphasizes a mode of looking, learning, gathering, and sharing that honours the knowledge of both experts and amateurs.

_Outdoor School_ brings together a multitude of epistemologies and knowledges across its pages. At times, certain performances and projects are truncated—Bill Burns’s _The Goat Milking_ (2014) and D’Arcy Wilson’s _#1 Fan_ (2018), for example, each appear on a single spread with a short write-up, more as an homage to the project than a careful reading. Elsewhere, however, the longer essays and conversations evoke a deep sense of embodiment that emphasizes the _Outdoor School_ methodology.

Morrell opens the book with a land acknowledgement of both the many lands the artists in _Outdoor School_ work on and his own upbringing in Unama’ki/ Cape Breton. He writes of standing in the kitchen of his childhood home, “I would look out the window at the mountain and the waterfall and think that this was where the water came from. \[…\] I remember the dirt on my hands, the water that came from the mountain, the sawdust from the mill that we used to store the carrots, the sense that I was not just in that place, but that I was made from it.” Both Borsato and Morrell foreground that sense of interconnectivity in their work—a porous relationship between land and self that centres reciprocity. Each of the artist projects in _Outdoor School_ is framed through that methodology, reminding the reader that to be an artist is to invoke connectivity to the histories, ecologies, cosmologies, and knowledges of the land on which we work and live.

_Outdoor School_ generates a public intellectual culture contingent on environmental learning. Non-Western taxonomies, Indigenous ecological knowledges, witch epistemologies, and queer and trans knowledges come together in a messy ecological web, more akin to the making of a life than an art practice. In this way, _Outdoor School_ inspires artistic practices that require a particular kind of embodiment and grounding—it is not the technical skill or mastery of materials that make the projects in _Outdoor School_ art, but the modes and methods by which the artists live their lives.

In reading _Outdoor School_, I wondered how this methodology might also reverberate toward policy and governance shifts related to climate change. Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson’s performance with Public Studio, _The Rights of Nature_ (2017), imagines a charter of rights for the Earth. The performance included a public reading of the charter by a chorus of performers who read clauses including “2a. the responsibility to recognize and respect that we are all one, that everything depends upon everything else, that we are all interconnected and interdependent and our fates are inextricably interlinked.” The performers call for the Canadian government to include this imagined charter in the country’s official Charters of Rights and Freedoms. The performance echoes the overarching theme of the book—that creative interventions can inspire a shift in our sense of responsibility toward our lived environments, which might in turn inspire the sense of interconnectivity and community that initiates institutional change.

In “Farm as Ethics,” Karen Houle describes her pedagogical practice through urban farming as institutional critique. At Guelph University, Houle teaches Western philosophy and uses the urban organic farm as an alternative site of learning. Alongside students, Houle farms as an antidote to the disembodied traditions of Western philosophical thought, resisting mind-body duality in exchange for holistic, resilience-building labour—hands in dirt and tasks dependent on whole systems. This labour, Houle describes, is the work of philosophy itself. She writes that, at the end of the day, “if we still have questions that still seem important \[…\] we can ‘do some philosophy’ together: we can trace out the ways that the claims in the texts we read do or do not align with what we have just done together. \[…\] We might suddenly find it all embarrassing and banal and stupefyingly pretentious, and if so, we’ll just divide up the leftover garlic and go home.”

I’m keeping the lessons of _Outdoor School_ with me through the winter: that to be an artist is to live in reciprocal relation with the environment, to care deeply for and listen closely to our surroundings. Through artistic intervention, the projects in _Outdoor School_ generate potential ways through our era of disaster. They imagine a decolonial, nurture-based culture that exists outside of, and in resistance to, galleries and institutions. While I’m not always sure that artistic interventions are the most effective mode of instigating political change, I’m inspired by Borsato and Morell’s pedagogy. I’m also inspired by the kids who are building blockades in defence of old-growth forests at Fairy Creek, by the Wet’suwet’en people who have been protecting their territory from Coastal Gaslink for years, and by the networks of mutual-aid organizers who have been finding ways to provide sustenance to their communities. The resounding notion throughout _Outdoor School_ is that our life-sustaining practices reverberate into our art. So how do the lives of activists and organizers fit in to the visual and intellectual culture that _Outdoor School_ imagines? As Borsato and Morrell’s project continues, I wonder how direct action, mutiny, and gestures more challenging to aestheticize will fit in to the landscape of contemporary Environmental Art. Can that shift in art practice forge a resonance beyond the arts sector, toward something impactful enough to mitigate this emergency?

Writer

Maps

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_Outdoor School_ was published by Douglas & McIntyre, Madeira Park, BC, 2021.

Outdoor School: Contemporary Environmental Art Ed. by Diane Borsato and Amish Morrell

Jayne Wilkinson is a writer, editor, and curator. She was formerly Editor-in-Chief at _Canadian Art_ and regularly contributes to art publications including _C Magazine_, _e-flux Criticism_, _esse arts + opinions_, _Momus_, and others. She holds an MA in Art History and Critical Theory from the University of British Columbia and is an occasional lecturer in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto.


The myth of infrastructure’s purposeful invisibility is persistent. Google Maps and Google Earth selectively determine what is visible online, and corporate landscaping constructs natural sightlines to hide infrastructures of extraction, transportation, and waste from view. Still, it’s very possible to see where our garbage piles up, to understand where our energy comes from, and to know the toxic supply chains that produce our devices. Will Kwan’s “Terra Economicus” confronts this terrain through a selection of installations and photographs spanning the past decade. The work builds an unexpected but direct relationship between the politics of class and colonization in India, Canada, and Hong Kong through integrated critiques of the “wellness” movement, environmental racism, and the habits of a leisure class who retreat from polluted, hot cities to find solace in mountaintops and lakesides.

In the title work, _Terra Economicus_ (Superior) (2017–2020), Kwan piles a dozen wooden Muskoka chairs (a style of chair popular in cottage country) to form a barrier in front of a video projection; the chairs are painted in the palette of Lawren Harris’s painting _Lake Superior_ (c. 1924), transposing representations of one region to another, Superior to Muskoka. The video shows drone flyover views sourced from realtor websites designed to show off the valuable assets of expensive lakefront vacation properties. Kwan’s careful editing produces a horror-film effect, with short, timed clips revealing just enough information to sense that something terrible has happened. Some are sunny scenes with wide, fisheye views, and others are cropped closely as though you are walking through the space yourself, but none have people in them. A loud buzzing with alternating silences accompanies each clip, and the persistent pace through lavish, empty homes is unsettling. Everything is on: lights, ceiling fans, taps, and showers—all wastefully running as though to prove an absolute luxury. It’s a science-fiction ending to the climate apocalypse to suggest that, even when all homes are abandoned, the wealthy will keep their water running. 

The subtle reference to Harris’s _Lake Superior_ may not be obvious to a casual observer, but in an institution like The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, which holds many works by the Group of Seven and Painters Eleven, the tangential critique is welcome. The Group of Seven frequently depicted the Canadian landscape empty of people, demonstrating land that was open to extraction—and were lauded for it. Throughout the 20th century, those images of Canada’s expansive geography maintained a visual iconography of wilderness such that the national economy could be built upon an aggressive program of logging, mining, and resource extraction. But as catastrophic climate change drives us toward increasingly unliveable conditions, real estate—rather than resource extraction—has become the industry that relies upon an imagery of wilderness to sell the fantasy of escape and remote living.

Elsewhere, Kwan’s conceptual approach to value and land use is made apparent through language, and the relationship between text and image. In _Terroir, Terror, Terroir,_ (2020–2021), four photographs show a field of grasses and wildflowers that have grown over a large landfill used exclusively by the city of Toronto. Overlaid texts describe the way it smells in the quirky, specific language of a professional sommelier: “penetrating aromas of rotten eggs, rotting cabbage, and boiled potatoes define the nose and attack sharply.” Those rotting, pervasive smells are a reality inequitably forced upon the communities adjacent to the dump who did not produce its trash. In _Meta_ (2020), digital stock photographs, showing outstretched arms cupping handfuls of soil, are paired with single-word metadata descriptors (some actual, some added by the artist) articulating a poetic web of destructive processes connected to resource extraction. The healthy, black soil is actually bitumen, which shifts the reading toward ideas of ecological destruction and dangerous toxicity. Excavating meaning through language aligns the work with legacies of Conceptual Art and photographic post-conceptualism—think of New York artists like Martha Rosler and Hans Haacke, or Vancouver artists like Ken Lum and Ian Wallace. Kwan’s critical engagement with the digital construction of contemporary images pushes beyond this earlier generation’s concerns, though, particularly given that digital files are already text/image constructions, made of pixels and code, not light and film. Still, like the photo-conceptualists, Kwan asks how we can so easily assume meaning in images: why does a meadow signify beauty or a handful of soil telegraph environmental consciousness?

The largest installation, _Mountain Pose_ (2010– 2020), critiques how the wellness industry and the widespread adaptation of yoga practices have capitalized on the very idea of nature as aesthetic, pleasing, and healthy. Hand-cut yoga mats are layered to produce topographical maps in three dimensions that accurately depict the locations of hill stations throughout India on a miniature scale. Hill stations were settlements high in the mountains established during British colonial occupation, and were largely based on military strategy and the premise that polluted cities were bad for health: retreat became a signifier of wealth and class. I wonder if it’s too simple to read this in light of the current moment, when many are leaving urban areas en masse, happy to work “remotely” as privilege affords. Of course, it’s not the working class who are able to do so. Those who work in hospitals, the service industry, and other front-line settings are not able to conduct their labour lakeside. The purpose of these high hill stations foretells a disturbing but coming future when only the wealthy can escape the most intense weather emergencies, retreating farther and farther from fires, rising seas, hurricanes, and unsafe drinking water.

On the opposite wall, an unlit neon sign reads “WATER IS TAUGHT BY THIRST”—an evocative aphorism suggesting we only know something through its absence. It’s poetic, but suggestive of more alarming contemporary realities for a country facing catastrophic wildfires and drinking-water advisories on First Nations lands in nearly every region, province, and territory—most recently in Iqaluit. Those who are thirsty know the price, and cost, of water. Kwan’s projects point to this capitalization of nature, through a determined and rigorous conceptual framing. It’s the aesthetic—and what the natural world signifies—that is being sold back to consumers as a class aspiration. This was a strangely foretelling exhibition, ostensibly about the economy of the land but ultimately about how the idea of nature can be marketed, bought, and sold as much as the tangible resources extracted from it.

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“Terra Economicus” ran from 2 October 2020 to 22 August 2021 at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, ON. Curated by Leila Timmins.

“Terra Economicus” — Will Kwan