Client

Overview

YYZ Artists’ Outlet Toronto, CA

The climate crisis is overwhelming—the problem is so huge that we struggle to understand its effects and outcomes on everyone in every place in the world.

With a nod to Oscar Wilde, while thinking about the climate crisis, deep ecology, reflection, and all I don’t know tangled up with all that I imagine, a love of nature, and a sprinkle of hope, Weather Report is a pictorial cycle on the gallery walls that explores how humans are destroying the living world in a gothic landscape where plants that once flourished progressively fade or thrive depending on how you move through the room. It is neither a hopeful future nor a catastrophic one. Scale is challenged; we are tiny in this landscape, with plant forms reaching 12 feet high. Mirrored mylar reflects the viewer but also implicates us in this ecosystem as it grows and falls apart, and yet, will our mark be visible in ten million years? The installation is Monet’s Garden for a changing world (ecosystem). The series of hand-cut vinyl pieces reflect the struggle for survival all over our planet today and the beauty and wonder in it.

Goals

This was a project for a show in an artist-run space in Toronto. I had much more freedom than I would have had in a commission, but I did want the work to match the scale of the space. I also wanted to choose plants with an Ontario and Toronto connection, such as the abstracted trillium flower and the bullrush plants that had been buried for 100 years.

Process

I made this work by hand.

Additional Information

While this is not a public art project, it is a large-scale project that could transfer to a public art project in mosaic, cut metal, paint, or glass.