Past Exhibitions

2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 1995 - 2000

Wildlife: a field guide to the post-natural

Curator: Lisa Gabrielle Mark

Ours is a time in which, more than ever, nature is shaped and defined by culture. Few places exist that have not been surveyed, measured and manipulated in some way - from microcosm to macrocosm. Even to observe is to intervene, as twentieth-century cultural anthropology tells us.

Our knowledge and experience of the so-called natural world is influenced by dominant political and corporate agendas and mediated by technology, science and mass media. In such a slippery epistemological context, referring to something as natural is really just a judgement on the degree of human intervention - or a marketing ploy. Much of what we call nature would perhaps be more accurately described as "post-nature."

The exhibition Wildlife is a non-comprehensive field guide to denizens of the post-natural landscape. From Lois Andison's feathered headsets, Nina Katchadourian's mended spiderwebs and Jake Moore's robotic moths, to Warren Quigley's caged companions and Louise Weaver's crocheted coverings for animal forms, each artist hints at the self-conscious irony of a species torn between its capacity to make reality according to its own designs and the undeniable necessity of finding harmony with those already in existence.

Wildlife: A field guide to the post-natural was organized by The Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto, Canada.