ARTIST STATEMENT

Being raised in Sarnia, I grew up immersed in the culture of Chemical Valley. Unpacking a childhood where alert sirens signal a Monday afternoon and the twinkling light from nearby refineries become a sublime part of the landscape means asking tough questions about my hometown and provoking conversations about corporate expropriation of land. Within a district surrounded by cameras and security, surveillance and careful observation using imaging techniques and networked technologies are transformed into tools of resistance.

This space plays host to the backend of an online artwork that pulls live atmospheric data and consolidates it into a visual spreadsheet reflecting corporate, sociopolitical, and environmental tensions within the petrochemical industry. Through access to the master file, visitors unpack obscured information and participate in digital interventions as they determine how land knowledge can be shared with the public.

On the wall, video projections carefully observing light and shadow and making use of infrared imaging invite questions of corporate control over the environment, and familiarity or strangeness to the land under current systems through interactions between light pollution and plant life, as well as visualizations of temperature. An ant farm composed of relocated ants and soil from the historic Village of Bluewater–expropriated Indigenous land, a past company town, and now an empty property allowing for industrial expansion–connects to themes of corporate-fuelled migration, with their planned return home as an act of resistance.

Lastly, silver halide photograms exposed to industrial light pollution reveal a landscape that has bore witness to political and corporate siege. Taking the form of bodies marginalized through colonialism and corporate interest, the paper absorbs the place and information encoded in the land within the development process through reactions with plants, precipitation, and water from Talfourd Creek.

Elizabeth Hunt

Elizabeth Hunt is a French Canadian settler artist from Sarnia, Ontario, the traditional Anishnaabek territory of Aamjiwnaang. Growing up having benefited from the economic impacts of the local petrochemical industry, but fearing its consequences on the environment and its occupants, she became increasingly aware of the complex politics of her hometown. As a conceptual artist, Elizabeth’s work is grounded in a systematic study of humanity in which she unpacks the intersections of the economic, social, political, and environmental. Within her practice, she seeks to take an interdisciplinary approach to social engagement and activism. By employing data visualization through the lens of developments in imaging techniques as well as networked information and communications technologies, Elizabeth’s work aims to provoke thoughtful inquiry and discussion as a means of communicating and bringing attention to contemporary issues.

Elizabeth earned a diploma in digital photography from Lambton College in 2017, and graduated from the Queen’s University BFAH program this spring. She is currently completing a Bachelor of Education at Queen’s University.

THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Elizabeth would like to thank Dr. Ella Dawn McGeough for her unwavering support throughout the development of this exhibition. She would also like to thank her fiance Tyler Manning and his family for their enthusiasm and assistance with many of the projects included in this exhibition.