October 15 – November 14, 2021
Jennifer Brant + Jennifer Ireland
Meet the Artist: Jennifer Brant: Saturday November 13th
shared microbial destiny: gifting
Please join Jennifer Brant in the Gallery on Saturday November 13th at 2pm for a sharing and gifting. Humans have a long history of working with beneficial bacteria. Fermentation practices can be found across cultures and go back thousands of years. Neuroscience is demonstrating that there is a connection between our microbiome, the bacterial flora that live in our digestive track, and the way we think and feel. Further research being done shows that when people eat the same fermented foods and share a similar microbial community within their bodies, they become bonded both to one another and to the place the bacteria come from, rooting them in community.
This gifting project developed from this premise. By harvesting vegetables grown around the Salish Sea, carefully preparing and then fermenting them, and distributing them to the community in handmade ceramic crocks, Jennifer is working to create kinship, both internally and externally.
The exhibition “Matters of Scale” will close at 4pm on Saturday November 13th. This is a great chance to meet the artist, see the work and leave with a part of the show.
Both artists are deeply invested in broad theoretical research, because they believe that to engage with environment and land is to engage with the histories, current challenges, and future possibilities alike. They reach multi-directionally through interdisciplinary works focusing on the phenomenological experience of land and place. Brant and Ireland’s research takes them through conversations, story sharing, explorations of historical documents and maps, and through their own subjective experiences. Building upon past works in their practices that theoretically intertwine, they have collaboratively made a series of works conceptually coupled around the stone, flora, and fauna.
Jennifer Brant
Brant’s art practice is rooted in a desire to be present and make connections. Central to her practice are the processes of working with materials and cultivating kinship. In her work, she attempts to transmute embodied experience into poetic objects that are intended to act as invitations, interfaces and/or archives. She creates situations where she might facilitate an encounter between herself and the more-than-human world, make herself vulnerable and expand the definition of person. She approaches her research and making with care, centralizing polyontological thinking, curiosity, and decolonization strategies.
Artist Bio:
Jennifer Brant is an interdisciplinary artist whose emergent research and material-based practice tries to concurrently experience, facilitate, and chronicle interactions with both the human and more-than-human world. She explores systems and relationships, marginalized spaces, complicated emotional states, and futurity. Using installations and interventions, field studies, textile practices, ceramics, writing, and drawing, she encourages and documents moments that bring an awareness of interconnection and kinship, gently interrupt passivity, and cultivate alternative narratives to our current mythologies of progress and nature.
Born and raised on the West Coast, an uninvited guest on the stolen territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ /Selilwitulh (Tslei-wa-tuth) people, as well as on the territory of the Tla-amin people, she divides her time between Vancouver and xʷɛʔɛt̓ay (Lasqueti Island), a small island off the grid. Brant holds a BFA and MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and a BEd from the University of British Columbia.
Jennifer Ireland
Jennifer Ireland’s research based practice reaches multi-directionally through interdisciplinary works, positioning awkwardly to simultaneously embrace curiosity, doubt and wonder. Ireland configures her artistic method through an open and direct engagement with the environment, characterized by responsiveness and making space for possible strategies for problem solving to emerge through the material research.
Ireland asks essential questions aimed to envision new ways of looking, knowing and being to reconsider contemporary relationships to nature and environment. Informed by evolving theories of equality and current research in science and liberal arts, Ireland is particularly invested in examining how contemporary life is influenced by old colonial and new de-colonial systems, and the connections between these and how our relationship with the earth is shifting in the age of the Anthropocene.
Artist Bio:
Jennifer Ireland is a multimedia artist working to reconfigure ways of knowing and ways of being in land through the questioning of traditional epistemologies and abstract boundaries. Ireland strives to make work that is mindful of situation, site, context, and access. This ethic is found in her work through specific materials and methods which are often light, sustainable and provisional. Ireland’s multi-medium, research-based practice ranges from drawing, photography, video, and sculpture, to site-sensitive installation and performance. Each artwork is made as a proposition that operates simultaneously as suggestion and possibility for de-colonial wayfinding in the Anthropocene.
Ireland’s home is in Mohkinstsis/Calgary, Canada, and she is grateful for and committed to the responsibilities of being a Treaty 7 person. Ireland holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Calgary, studied drawing and sculpture at Alberta University of the Arts, and holds a Masters of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2018).
The SCAC would like to thank our generous sponsors who make our ongoing work possible: the SCAC Membership, the District of Sechelt, the BC Arts Council, the SC Community Forest Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Sunshine Coast Foundation and the Sunshine Coast Credit Union.