Quest Art's 2020 TD Thor Wealth Management Juried Exhibition: Quest for the Environment

Dimensions: 120 x 87 x 7.62

100 word Artist Statement about the work: In Bench, as panoramic photo-diptych, I use the metaphor of the castle garden. To be in such a garden is to stand in the middle of a vision of the world—the garden is in itself a cosmological statement where within its symmetrical plan and ordered framework, particularity is seemingly understood to be varied, fertile and hospitable. But how is this order maintained? What are the underlying expectations? Here this distorted garden bench acts in image to create a disturbance inviting us to see, through a contemporary anthropogenic lens, the Holocene ruptured and reassessed through a now insidiously altered topography.

Dimensions: 250 x 92

100 word Artist Statement about the work: This project is an inter-species collaboration between myself and thousands of honeybees. Bees are often considered a harbinger of the health of our planet, and their mass global disappearance is interpreted as an indicator of our environment's peril. My work explores the boundaries of where humans collide with the natural environment, and re-imagines the possible outcomes of this encounter. The pieces celebrate the bees’ delicate and complex work, and mirror these qualities in playful unison. The collection offers hope at a time when we are overwhelmed with despair at the state of the climate, and our role in its destruction.

Dimensions: 48 x 24 x 5

100 word Artist Statement about the work: This project is an inter-species collaboration between myself and thousands of honeybees. Bees are often considered a harbinger of the health of our planet, and their mass global disappearance is interpreted as an indicator of our environment's peril. My work explores the boundaries of where humans collide with the natural environment, and re-imagines the possible outcomes of this encounter. The pieces celebrate the bees’ delicate and complex work, and mirror these qualities in playful unison. The collection offers hope at a time when we are overwhelmed with despair at the state of the climate, and our role in its destruction.

Dimensions: 48 x 24 x 5

100 word Artist Statement about the work: You are hours into a hike when you reach the river’s edge. Your nostrils flare as you inhale the cool cleansing aroma. You’re overcome with an urge to experience it. Off come the hiking boots. Socks strewn on the shoreline as you hop across the uneven rocks trying to get your pants rolled up to your knees. You pause at the shoreline, testing its qualities with your toes. With minor hesitation, you wade deeper, embracing its restorative briskness. It rushes against your calves and soothes your aching feet. Its temperature seems to rise matching yours. The intention of these riverscapes is to ignite our tactile desire to connect with water. Inspiring a consideration of the reciprocal commitment we have with water.

Dimensions: 92 x 46 x 2

100 word Artist Statement about the work: This project is an inter-species collaboration between myself and thousands of honeybees. Bees are often considered a harbinger of the health of our planet, and their mass global disappearance is interpreted as an indicator of our environment's peril. My work explores the boundaries of where humans collide with the natural environment, and re-imagines the possible outcomes of this encounter. The pieces celebrate the bees’ delicate and complex work, and mirror these qualities in playful unison. The collection offers hope at a time when we are overwhelmed with despair at the state of the climate, and our role in its destruction.

Dimensions: 48 x 24 x 5

100 word Artist Statement about the work: we are in the last human race - between everything bad we have caused and our pitiful hopes that rapidly advancing technology will save us - i wish us luck.

Dimensions: 152.4 x 182.88 x 8

100 word Artist Statement about the work: My long time preoccupation towards reducing the carbon footprint in making art is now even more important. “Towers” is the result of a conscious decision to avoid using new materials and to work only with things that are in my immediate environment. My environmental concerns, the war on plastic, our collective fear or viruses, the invisible threat causing anxiety all appeared as symbols of microscopic organism on the black vessels. “Towers” could also be called “There’s a whole in my bucket”. That song is a long list of excuses for not fixing a problem. Is in what we are doing?

Dimensions: 173 x 183 x 92

Dimensions: 30 x 24 x 1.5

100 word Artist Statement about the work: My work seeks to connect the viewer with the world unseen. The timbre of my practice allows for introspection and reflection; it allows the viewer space to consider their own inner dimension, the relationship with our fragile environment, and ultimately to their place in this world. By focusing on parts of the whole, the viewer must either either reconstruct or fill in the blanks for the themselves. It is this process—using the concept of the fragment, as well as the void—that the viewer is confronted with both the familiar and the sublime. The simplicity of the works belies it’s intentioned impact. By giving equal importance to the dichotomy of the tangible and intangible, and to positive and negative space, I strive to create work that transports, exalts and becomes meditative. In exploring our connection to these landscapes, I highlight the importance of not only protecting our natural habitats and environment, but also a way of preserving space for inner reflection.

Dimensions: 44 x 44 x 1.5

100 word Artist Statement about the work: "Earthtones" highlights one of our most precious and beloved local commodities, the Georgian Bay shoreline. This piece reflects my lifelong connection to The Bay and the nostalgia it imparts…something I desperately want to protect. The past decade has seen extremely low and now high water marks that have kept residents on edge; but more importantly they threaten the coastal wetlands that support clean water and habitat for the wildlife in this region. Many factors effect the water levels, but human driven climate change will continue to have the greatest impact until we can collectively take action.

Dimensions: 76 x 152 x 4

100 word Artist Statement about the work: In Density Test, I slowly intake 7.4g of milkweed into my mouth. The milkweed becomes compressed and fills my mouth until I reach a point where I cannot take in anymore. I expel the milkweed. The results are then weighed and measured. This process is an internal reflection on consumption, discomfort, and our human removal from the natural process of seed dispersal.

Dimensions: 165 x 142 x 3

Dimensions: 69 x 92 x 1.5

Dimensions: 76 x 101 x 1.5

100 word Artist Statement about the work: My work is an outward reflection of my inner self, seeking to understand the many facets of human nature interacting with ourselves and our environments.

Dimensions: 9 x 12

100 word Artist Statement about the work: My making of screens have evolved over the last 30 years. I worked with screen concept early on in my art career when we lived for several years in SOHO ,New York after my MFA . I made screens for a show at the London Regional Art gallery from personal objects in the 1980’s and a screen for Art Gallery of Windsor. Screens can become portals to other realities, spiritual,physical and magical and extend the power of sacred spaces. Living on Georgian Bay waterfront, my days are shaped by water, sand,stone, sky, wind and objects washed to shore by powerful winds. This “SCREEN ON THE BEACH” was made by attaching found wood pieces,tree trunks,branches and roots to the Poplar tree on our beach. The space offered by the line of Poplars becomes a viewpoint for the making of the screen that both delineates a space and the placement of the screen references back to its environment . The SCREEN becomes a structure of memory,texture and space suggesting a boundary but also a window into the continuity of water,sand and rocks.The screen changes the initial,natural elements washed to shore into an art experience that suggests a sacred space. I have taken these natural objects and have extended them into a visual reminder,a visual notebook of the power of water, wind and sand .

Dimensions: 3200.4 x 243.8 x 35.56

100 word Artist Statement about the work: Embedded with memory, magnetism and potential, materials have a way of shifting, lingering and re-configuring over, in and outside of time. Fascinated with how the material and non-material are interconnected and interdependent assemblages of matter, I work at the intersection of ecology, art and geography to examine how unmaking might help artists move beyond metaphorical narratives that keep settlers complicit to colonial, capitalist and patriarchal systems that privilege certain human and non-human bodies over the social, economic, political and environmental well-being of others. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the tradition of landscape, my practice-led research often incorporates ready-mades to consider the ecological realities of the Anthropocene while critiquing the spectacle of consumerism.

Dimensions: 1000 x 600 x 60

100 word Artist Statement about the work: Embedded with memory, magnetism and potential, materials have a way of shifting, lingering and re-configuring over, in and outside of time. Fascinated with how the material and non-material are interconnected and interdependent assemblages of matter, I work at the intersection of ecology, art and geography to examine how unmaking might help artists move beyond metaphorical narratives that keep settlers complicit to colonial, capitalist and patriarchal systems that privilege certain human and non-human bodies over the social, economic, political and environmental well-being of others. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the tradition of landscape, my practice-led research often incorporates ready-mades to consider the ecological realities of the Anthropocene while critiquing the spectacle of consumerism.

Dimensions: 70 x 70 x 25

100 word Artist Statement about the work: Most often the work I do is my response to a culture that has used economics as a measure of our wellbeing. While culture is always economically driven, be that in a hunter gatherer mindset where the “economics” is immediately apparent at the end of the day, or in a western culture where my hunting and gathering is seen in my investment portfolio. The works in this show are more focused on the environment and how a corporate mindset of capital gain is always the end game determinant. I am looking and saying, “Look at what my lifestyle has taken from the land.”

Dimensions: 60 x 60 x 1.27