Kingsbury & Bowen: ReMediate

Boarding House Gallery: 6 Dublin St. S., Guelph, ON, Open: Tuesday to Friday, 12-5pm and Saturday, 9am-3pm

Exhibition Dates: June 4 – July 23, 2016

Public Reception & Book Launch: Sat, Jun 18 at 2 pm

Paper Making & Creative Writing Interactive Performances (all ages):
Every Wed, Jun 8 – Jul 20, 6-8 pm; Sat, Jul 9 and Sat, Jul 23, 11 am – 1 pm

Celebrate Pollinator Week: Sat, Jun 25 at the Eastview Landfill Site: Writing in Place with Anna Bowen, 10-11 am; Pollination Walk with Christina Kingsbury, 11 am – noon

Public Reading with ReMediate Artists & Authors: Wednesday, Jul 20 at 7pm Karen Houle will read from her essay, Re(Meditations) on Earth, Poetry, Care and Labour; Anna Bowen will read poetry from the collection; and Christina Kingsbury will read a text about the ReMediate project. The public is invited to read aloud texts from the book as well. Light refreshments provided. Hosted by PS Guelph at Boarding House Gallery.

This collaborative exhibition by visual artist Christina Kingsbury and poet Anna Bowen represents the culmination of a three-year site specific installation on the former Eastview Landfill site in Guelph, Ontario. Kingsbury’s 2,000 square foot quilt, made of handmade paper embedded with local native seeds, was installed on the site in 2014-15. As the quilted paper decomposes, it yields a pollinator garden: a reconstitution of lands ravaged by more than 4 million tonnes of waste between 1961 and 2003. Bowen’s poetry documents the artist’s labours, from seed harvesting to hand quilting, and gives elegiac expression to the stories, both contemporary and historical, collected on and about the site. Through poetic expression, Bowen locates the ReMediate collaboration within ideas of place, home, labour, and location.

The presentation of ReMediate at the Boarding House Gallery includes documentation of the collective labours of this installation through video, poetry, and photography. ReMediate looks at “how language mediates our relationship to, and holds this potential for communication with, nature,” says Kingsbury. “It imagines reciprocity with a landscape that has been severely altered and degraded.”

Since 2014, ReMediate has received support from the Ontario Arts Council, The Guelph Community Foundation: Musagetes Fund, and The Elevator Project (Guelph), and Pollination Guelph. ReMediate is presented at the Boarding House Gallery by the Art Gallery of Guelph with support from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.