CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Blanketed by highly reflective clouds that make it the brightest of our solar system’s planets, Venus has inspired scientists, artists, and poets across space and time.
For all its tantalizing brilliance, consider the inhospitality of its conditions: roasting temperatures of hundreds of degrees and vaporous gasses containing droplets of corrosive sulfuric acid. An environment unlikely to harbour life as we know it. And yet, remarkably, recent evidence by way of phosphine (a gas associated with living organisms) suggests that microorganisms may exist swirling within the planet’s atmosphere.
It is well known that the fine arts program at Queen’s is contending with certain challenges. A pause on admissions, a shrunken student body, and dwindling resources after years of austerity and further budget cuts on the horizon. And yet, as we imagine life might possibly, improbably exist on Venus, art persists—similarly ephemeral, seemingly undercover, unmoored from the foundations of past or future, in what can easily be understood as a difficult environment. Within this context, Mice on Venus brings together eight third-year sculpture and time-based-media students through three collaborative projects. By extending Union Gallery’s physical framework, each work leans into elaboration, humour, and relationality to address what the students have determined as campus-wide needs and discrepancies: joy, colour, energy, fun!
Leona Bergeron, Minghui Mai, and Lynette Zhang turn towards the sociality of mixed-media sculpture within a toilet stall’s unconventional walls. As a site of private refuge, their project cultivates a poetic garden for cross-cultural reflection/pollination through fragmentary phrases printed in multiple languages amongst psychedelic, three-dimensional imagery of plants and flowers. Expanding their presence beyond the gallery, the artists have hung posters in washrooms across campus in an attempt to bring strange liveliness to otherwise featureless institutional settings.
Catherine Ellis, Khush Sagar, and Hannah White host a psychogeographic party unsettling Ontario Hall’s mid-century nuclear history while counteracting their felt absence of artistic community within the university more broadly. As a celebratory relational event, the project offers an opportunity for students across fine arts, art history, conservation, and their peers to gather, to mix, to build social bonds outside disciplinary constraints—to see what happens when bodies shift together towards sensation and imagination. Save the date! Wednesday November 29th, 7 – 9pm. Documentation and decorative ephemera will move, untethered, to find new form within the exhibition.
Keira Sainsbury and Sarah Silva develop a text-based soft sculpture hung ceremoniously outside Ontario Hall, to later be installed in Union Gallery. Functioning as a silent manifesto, the work articulates the frequently ignored challenges encountered by emerging artists while raising questions about the disproportionate attention (and funding) directed towards other academic disciplines in contrast to the fine arts. Taking the form of a parody, the work’s scale and hand-crafted materiality offers a stark contrast to the slick and grandiose displays of branding by other programs. Asking, Leonardo, why so troubled? the project aims “to gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection.”
– Ella Dawn McGeough, Adjunct Professor of Sculpture and Time-Based-Media
