An Absolute Movement brings together a body of work by Sonny Assu, Fiona Bowie, Matt Browning, Kelly Jazvac, Genevieve Robertson & Jay White that address the ongoing devastation of climate change and environmental crisis.

As the consequences of climate change continue to threaten our ways of living and being, the question of time has become a crucial dimension underwriting our modes of understanding and grappling with the realities of ecological crisis. The works gathered bridge entangled temporalities, visualizing and materializing the precarious situation of the present and the uncertain futures that have yet to unfold.

Sonny Assu’s series of photographs, Longing (2011), navigate the entwined processes of capitalism and colonialism through a reflection on the material detritus of the logging industry in British Columbia; Fiona Bowie’s Surface (2010-2013) documents the underwater realm of False Creek in the wake of the area’s decimation by industrialization and urbanization; Matt Browning’s Untitled (2017) are woven silk spirals that index the artist’s labour with the labour of silkworms, whose bodies are sacrificed in the pursuit of the luxury material; Kelly Jazvac’s Plastiglomerates (2013) are post-consumer readymades comprised of sand, stone, shell, and coral mixed with plastic detritus that has washed ashore on Kamilo Beach, Hawaii; Genevieve Robertson & Jay White’s pinhole camera images, Watchers (2015), document the proposed route of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline in an act of counter-surveillance to critically engage with the shifting landscapes of extraction.

This exhibition is curated by Weiyi Chang, a graduate student in Critical and Curatorial Studies at the University of British Columbia.

The exhibition is made possible with support from the Killy Foundation and the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies through the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory in collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia.