TREE MUSEUM
NEAR DWELLERS
C0-HOSTED WITH STREET ROAD ARTISTS' PROJECT SPACE
A MULTI-PART ART & RESEARCH PROJECT THAT EXPLORES ANIMAL-HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS WITH A FOCUS ON THE SPACES AND PLACES WE SHARE
NEAR DWELLERS & THE SHARING OF BREATH
PART 1:
AUGUST 4 - SEPTEMBER 30, 2023
Sarah Le Quang Sang, aka SLQS, and her film, Walking Together, opened Near Dwellers inquiry on human and animal relationships. Her film provocatively and poetically situates us in the midst of a walk with rider and horse as they move through the interstitially urban lands of Walthamstow Marshes, in London, United Kingdom. However, this walk is not a performance of equestrian mastery over one of the most iconic animals in human culture. SLQS draws us into a meditation on the very essence of our connection to other beings: The simple, but often missed act of breathing together.
TREE MUSEUM
NEAR DWELLERS
AS LEGAL BEINGS
PART 2:
OCTOBER 13 - DECEMBER 30, 2023
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Fawn Daphne Plessner’s artworks and Susanna Kamon’s videography attest to animals as political agents in their own right, i.e., to the essential nature of animals as legal beings.
Currently, within Canada's legal system, animals are classified as 'property' – a conception based on English Common Law and one that underpins the workings of the colonial capitalist state. The notion of animals as property also shapes imaginaries of animals as mere "things" that are wholly subject to human needs and desires. In the growing awareness of Indigenous Laws, we learn that the status of animals is not so conceived. All animals are understood as constituting their own nations and this, in turn, encloses humans in a wider matrix of political memberships, social and political obligations, and ethical responsibilities. This exhibition therefore explores the role that aesthetic experiences offer in seeing the critters with whom we reside alongside as political subjects in their own right.
NEAR DWELLERS AS CREATIVE COLLABORATORS
PART 3:
FEBRUARY 2 - APRIL 13 2024
Artists Julie Andreyev and Ruth K. Burke introduce us to human-animal creative collaborations that seek to foster kinship relations with other critters and wider ecologies. Their art projects press us to engage with more critical questions of the ethics of these relationships and how one might re-imagine animal labour, in the case of Ruth K. Burke's collaborations, and the nature of interspecies reciprocity, in the works of Julie Andreyev. This exhibition asks: What can artists who have co-created art with their companion or neighbouring animals teach us about the ethics of animal-human relations?
NEAR DWELLERS AS URBANITES
PART 4:
MAY 3 2024 - JANUARY 1 2025
Artists Doug LaFortune and Jesse Garbe focus our attention on the visual representation of animals, and what this tells us about the legacy of differing Indigenous and Colonial cultural attitudes to the more-than-human world. In light of the environmental turbulence with which we are all faced, how do symbols of animals, and/or images of animals as expressions of joy and love, inform our understanding of more-than-human beings within rapidly expanding urban environments?
NEAR DWELLERS
2025
FORTHCOMING PROJECTS
PART 5:
NEAR DWELLERS AS ROADKILL
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PART 6:
NEAR DWELLERS AS FRIENDS
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PART 7:
NEAR DWELLERS AS INDWELLERS