The Eroding Garden
La machine qui enseignait des airs aux oiseaux
Le Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal, Canada
February 10 - April 25, 2021
Curated by Mark Lanctôt and François LeTourneux
The Eroding Garden, 2019Copper (pre-1995 Canadian pennies), vitreous enamel, stainless steel, plaster, 24k gold leaf, hand forged steel, porcelain300cm x 300cm x 300cmInstallation view at Musée d'art contemporain de MontréalPhotograph by Yen-Chao Lin
The Eroding Garden is a critical inquiry of intuition, power and ethics, where dowsing is used as a creative methodology, and an alternative technology for land, water and colonial history remediation.
Dowsing or ''water witching'' refers to the practice of using a forked stick, metal rods, pendulum, or similar device to locate underground water, minerals, sites, information, or other hidden and lost substances. Scrutinized by science and religion, dowsing has long been a subject of discussion and controversy. In ancient China, water divining is an adjacent practice to Feng Shui, known as ''seeking the dragon flow with the claw of the dragon.” In the mid-1600s under the Inquisition, dowsing was associated with witchcraft, although it was still tolerated and practiced by many Christian farming communities. A double-edged sword, dowsing is also used by the petroleum industry to locate oil wells, mining companies for ore, as well as the US army in Korea and Vietnam to find tunnels and food caches.
The relationship between dowsing and the Anthropocene is complex. In Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism , anthropologist and critical theorist Elizabeth A. Povinelli challenges the distinction between the geochemistry of the earth and the biochemistry of life. In present day Canadian postcolonial ecology, where human intervention has left indelible traces, and where strategies of power are designed to protect open markets as methods of conserving liberal governance and the accumulation of wealth for dominant classes and social groups, the force of the particular life and nonlife arrangement of capitalism has begun to affect all other biological, geological, and meteorological forms.
Working with porcelain, vitreous enamel, Canadian copper pennies and steel, The Eroding Garden investigates material transformation, and seeks to give form to what cannot be seen, but can be felt with three sculptural components: - the Dowser's hands through which the invisible vibrations are felt and interpreted. - the porcelain bowl with gilded chopsticks that my grandmother used to communicate with the deceased according to a family legend. - enameled penny strips made of more than 2000 Canadian copper pennies, which were taken out of circulation in 2013 when production cost 1.6 cents. The labour intensive production echoes the process of mining, smelting and minting of these tokens of commerce and control.
