Exhibition: spontaneous gift
Open until Nov 15
Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (KWAG)
101 Queen St N, Kitchener, ON N2H 6P7, Canada
Free
Organized by Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (KWAG)
spontaneous gift centres on nature spirits as an active presence in urban ecologies and the flows of material and energy that sustain them. In transcending the limited understandings of non-human entities as being destined for either extraction or conservation exclusively, Boring Earth expands relationships beyond a resource-based exchange. The exhibition invites plural and otherwise ways of being, thinking and acting that re-weave the material and the spiritual, and enchant everyday practices of living in urbanized places.
Accepting Boring Earth’s spontaneous gift demands attention: to spirits who inhabit the built environment; to how we build and exist with spiritual worlds of knowing and being; to how we can hold and nurture multiplicity. In this exhibition, a leak, flood and other uncanny disruptions become expressions of elemental presence and agency. More-than-Western reverential and relational practices shape the space and how the artists approach it, including offerings made to the elemental beings who animate the infrastructural underbelly of the art institution. Around and through grates, portals and thresholds, spontaneous gift is about following energy, noticing above, beside and below, and caring expansively toward a richness of life and being.