past exhibitions 2024
2024 Past Exhibitions
About the Exhibition
Sara Angelucci transforms found photographs and creates images exposing the cultural and historical conditions outside the image frame, bringing attention to the social forces that generate the language of photography.
Undergrowth brings together several bodies of work produced over the last decade that examine the ways in which photographic practices have contributed to the divide between humans and nature. This direction finds its impetus in her series Aviary (2013), which morphs images of extinct or endangered birds with found Victorian cartes-de-visite portraits to form strange, hybrid creatures. These works, alongside series such as Arboretum (2016) and the sculptural installationSightings (Ivory-Billed Woodpecker) (2015), consider the implications of the historical Western impulse to capture and classify nature.
Angelucci’s most recent works are grounded in environmental engagement, investigating local plant species and the vulnerable habitats we disturb. Nocturnal Botanical Ontario (2019–ongoing) highlights the intricate webs of native, introduced, and invasive plant species in our immediate proximity, while her video Ghost Orchard (2022) captures the overrun growth of an abandoned orchard just before impending plans for urban redevelopment will cause its disappearance.
Throughout these interconnected projects, Angelucci offers thoughtful and intimate acts of attention that evolve from a place of reverence and respect, as she seeks to examine and reconcile our relationship with the natural world.
Undergrowth is co-presented by the Art Gallery of Mississauga, the Art Gallery of Sudbury, the Varley Art Gallery of Markham, and Tom Thomson Art Gallery.
The artist would like to thank the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for their support of work included in this exhibition.
Funding for the Art Gallery of Mississauga is provided by the City of Mississauga, the Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, TD Bank Group, Rama Gaming House, and Charitable Gaming Community Good.
Photo Credit: Toni Hafkenscheid Photography
About the Exhibition
A member of Curve Lake First Nation and citizen of the Nishnaabeg Nation, artist Olivia Whetung draws upon her experience working on and with the land to create artworks that speak of the interdependence and relationality within our ecosystem.
Researching land-based and food de-commodifying movements, Anishinaabe knowledge, and the ecology of her home territory, Whetung has produced a series of sculptural installations, digital prints, and three-dimensional beadworks that articulate the vital connectivity between woodland, wetland, and garden environments. The artist’s first-hand observations are nourished by a critical understanding of Western agricultural models and natural science methodologies as detrimental to the ecologies of Southern Ontario, where they have caused massive environmental destruction. Western worldviews, brought over by European settlers, treat only cleared farmland as “productive” while deeming woodland and wetland unmanageable and useless. These outlooks centre human needs and desires at the expense of the ecosystem’s survival.
Whetung’s poignant works solicit our attention and reconsideration of spaces and species that are crucial to biodiversity and to sustainable food production. Tenderly foregrounding our more-than-human neighbours, they remind us that we are not the only ones to benefit from the land’s gifts, nor to suffer from ecological ruin. The exhibition’s Anishinaabemowin title, inawendiwok, loosely translates as “they are related to each other,” emphasizing the ways in which coexistence within the ecosystem is mutually linked. With human yearning for endlessly available resources and sanitized nature comes devastating loss. Only through a renewed understanding of kinship and gratitude may we restore an ecology based on responsibility and reciprocity that can sustain the future.
Funding for the Art Gallery of Mississauga is generously provided by the City of Mississauga, the Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, Rama Gaming House and Charitable Gaming Community Good.
