January 17 – April 7, 2019
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 17 at 7 pm
Studying the forces that shape and transform human relationships with the environment, Lisa Hirmer’s work spans visual art, social practice, and writing. In We Are Weather, she explores how we recognize and represent environmental change at a moment when the Holocene, a geological era of climate stability, gives way to a new epoch, the Anthropocene, in which humans act as a planet-scale force. While we are aware of changing conditions – from mass extinctions to climate change – the unprecedented scale of these changes and their cascading impacts can be difficult to make sense of in the context of daily life. Juxtaposing the outcomes of Hirmer’s creative research with works she has selected from the Art Gallery of Guelph’s permanent collection, this exhibition examines how we move from simply observing to registering these losses and understanding their accumulating effects.
Presented with the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, We Are Weather is curated by Shauna McCabe and features text by Elwood Jimmy. The artist would like to acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Royal Ontario Museum, Alice Yard, Spark Box Studio, Art Gallery of Ontario, Region of Waterloo Archives, and the City of Guelph Artist-in-Residence program – in particular Mark Peck, Chris Cozier, Kriston Chen, Anique Jordan, Andrew Hunter, Charlotte Woodley, and Jen Rafter.
Lisa Hirmer is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans visual media, social practice, performance, research and occasionally writing. Her work is primarily concerned with collective relationships – that which exists between things rather than simply in them – in communities, publics and other assemblies of people, as well as in our relationships with the more-than-human world. Hirmer has shown her work across Canada and internationally including at Third Space (Saint John), Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Doris McCarthy Gallery (Toronto), Art Gallery of Mississauga, Cambridge Galleries, Tasdance (Australia), Peninsula Arts (U.K.), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), CAFKA (Kitchener-Waterloo), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Flux Factory (USA) and Queens Museum (USA). She is currently based in Guelph.
We Are Weather Panel Discussion
Thursday, March 21, 2019 | 6 – 8 pm | Free
AGG Second Floor
Accessible | Free Parking | Refreshments will be served
Join us for a panel discussion on Thursday, March 21 at 6 pm featuring artist Lisa Hirmer in conversation with poet and ecologist Madhur Anand, and writer, facilitator and gardener Elwood Jimmy. In response to the exhibition We Are Weather, panelists will discuss human relationships with weather – the ways weather shapes us and our lives and the ways humans are now shaping the weather of the future – particularly in the context of climate change.
Speaking from three unique places, the panelists will join the audience in considering a series of questions: What does it mean to be alive and aware in this moment of catastrophic change? How can we register what is happening in ways that are deeply felt but do not succumb to dejection? What practices can we turn to in order to make sense of living within this trouble? Where are there possibilities for moving towards less destructive ways of being?
Image: Lisa Hirmer, Watching, Dull Edges (the northern hemisphere of a 23°27′ tilt), 2017, photograph, 16 x 24″