Common Collective: Land/Line

With urban encroachment, farmland in Ontario has dropped by 1.6 million acres since 1991, while the population has grown by 3.5 million. The same period has also seen a transformation of the rural work force, technology, machinery, crops, food science, and of course, the land itself. With Land/Line, the Stratford-based Common Collective presents an interactive installation that combines new media and analog technologies to explore social and environmental changes witnessed in rural environments in Ontario over the past half-century.

Incorporating 4K videography, stop motion and digital animation, aerial and archival footage, field recordings, found objects, and hand-built elements, the project examines the dramatic transition away from traditional subsistence-based farming systems towards increasingly mechanized, large-scale commercial farming and the complex impact this has had for rural lands. Land/Line explores our contemporary landscapes and the social values, economics, and changing technologies that have shaped them, themes that are prominent in a diversity of research and teaching programs at the University of Guelph as well as the Art Gallery of Guelph’s ongoing Land Studio program, currently featuring Phoenix-based artist Matthew Moore whose socially-engaged art practice focuses on farming and food activism through community-engaged practice.

Image detail: Common Collective, Land/Line, 2017, 3-channel video and sound