Natural Agents
Open weekends 12-5 November 14th-22nd, 2020
Natural Agents is an exhibition of large-scale photographs of “uninhabited” village and industry sites that challenge the ecologically erroneous, colonial notion of terra nullius (an empty land) by highlighting that where human-centered systems of management are absent, life exists and often thrives.
The photographs included in the exhibition were taken over an 18-month period as artist Connie Michele Morey travelled the east and west coasts of Canada to sites that are often referred to as abandoned, empty, or uninhabited because they are no longer dominated by anthropocentric systems of management. In each of these sites, the life forces of marginalized voices are evident through the intergrowth of pioneer plant species and the graffitied voices of human animals on walls subject to the brutal effects of industry and natural disasters. This creative proliferation speaks to the impossibility of any empty land and our ever-present interdependence with the ecology that is.