In this work, collection is a tool to investigate the emotional geography of the architectural everyday.

All works illustrate a striving to understand and connect particular elements of contemporary life.

A Vast Metabolism is an exhibition about the entangled histories of forests and humans. It looks back in time to better understand how the timber industry shaped a landscape in its image, and situates this history in the colonial drive for territorial management and resource extraction. By reducing the forest to an abstract space it becomes an environment of control and commodification, where trees exist in terms of the value of the products into which they are transformed. Alongside this instrumentalized notion of forest, are the varied ways it has entered into and been represented by the cultural imaginary; on maps, as paintings, in poetry, through textbooks. These forms of representation work at once to mythologize its spiritual potential while rendering it fundamentally outside (or beyond) the human sphere of life.

Wilderness, nature, these ever-shifting concepts are exactly that: concepts with specific histories that exert with great force how we see, feel and understand the natural world. And so A Vast Metabolism is in dialogue with these conditions. Anchored by a video installation that traces the flow of trees as woody matter-inmotion between Algonquin Provincial Park and Chaudiere Falls in Ottawa, two important spatial nodes of timber infrastructure connected by a network of waterways, the exhibition branches into a body of work that further investigates the arboreal interactions that constitute the metabolic relation between society and its trees. It is a meditation on place, but also the story of how earth is arranged by capital and the limited model of forest that such material organizations imply.

Watch Noah Scheinman’s walk through of the exhibition here.

A Vast Metabolism was on display in the Main Gallery from September 12, 2020 to October 31, 2020.