Visitors to Carleton University Art Gallery (CUAG) will be greeted by an unusual welcoming committee during the next few months — a big blue sperm whale named Tryphon.
He is not a live sperm whale, mind you — Tryphon has been given a second life by artist Cynthia Girard-Renard, who modelled him out of paper and wood.
Girard-Renard said the original Tryphon was the first sperm whale ever recorded in the St. Lawrence River, who died in 2009 after becoming entangled in crab traps.
Tryphon is part of CUAG’s new exhibit, The Air of the Now and Gone, brought to life by guest curators Kirsty Robertson and Sarah E.K. Smith from Western University. The curators have been planning the exhibit with CUAG since 2017.
Both curators said their aim for the exhibit was to complicate feelings about the climate crisis and break away from a pure positivity-negativity binary.
“ Sarah and I wanted to think about how we could shift the conversation from empty kinds of rhetoric around optimism, so just being like, ‘It’ll be fine.’ Or also despair, like ‘We’re all going to die,’” Robertson said. “And thinking about artists whose work really complicates that.”
Smith said humans often think in grand narratives that are straightforward and easy to grasp. This exhibit aims to explore different instances that offer complexity on climate change.
“Each artist has a kind of emotional register or emotional response that we’re exploring as ways of thinking about the way that we live in the world,” Robertson said. “Holding space for both joy and then also action to hopefully address some of the issues of climate change.”
In a digital QR code accompanying the exhibition, Robertson and Smith identify a specific feeling that is associated with each of the eight featured artists’ work. It says Girard-Renard’s Tryphon is meant to inspire empathy.
Visitors to the exhibition can go under Tryphon and put their head inside his stomach to view a film projected on the inside of his head. Girard-Renard said the film imagines the whale’s final moments, showing the words “Maman!” (“Mother!”) and finally, “Au revoir, mes amis” (“Goodbye, friends”).
Girard-Renard said they wanted to speak for those who cannot speak and hope Tryphon’s story will help visitors view him as an individual with his own memory and culture, rather than just a member of a species.
In the exhibit, artist Colin Lyons has a sculpture and a series of six etchings. Two of the etchings are titled Arctic Ice Restoration and Planetary Sunshade. Each etching depicts a proposed technological solution to climate change, such as geoengineering, which is the manipulation of environmental processes on a major scale.
The digital publication also identifies Lyons work as eliciting a sense of wonder.
“ [My work] might be dealing with perhaps the most controversial of the responses to the climate futures that are out there right now, which is geoengineering,” Lyons said. “I’m in no way advocating for these technologies. They’re crude, they’re invasive — they’re likely to fail.”
“But I also am recognizing that at this point, at the trajectory we’re on, they may end up being part of the future, whether we like it or not … If we are going down that route, we don’t want to be doing it blindly, and we want to be thinking about what these processes are.”
Sarah Blumel, who attended the opening of the exhibition, said she thinks the climate crisis is an important topic to explore in artistry.
“Complicated issues deserve more than language. I think sometimes there’s a limit to language when we’re talking about big, complicated stuff,” she said. “Art gives us an opportunity to experience things that are really hard and difficult and complicated and that don’t have clear solutions.”
Robertson, who is also the director of the Centre for Sustainable Curating at Western University, said she and Smith took sustainability into account in several ways when building the exhibit.
One method included painting information about the exhibition onto the wall using charcoal suspended in potato starch paste, rather than using disposable signage. They said the charcoal paint should wash off the wall.
“ We didn’t want an exhibition that created a huge amount of waste, for example, where there was a lot of garbage and a lot of things that would be in the landfill or dump for centuries,” Robertson said. “We wanted to think about how the exhibition itself could leave a smaller trace on the world.”
The Air of the Now and Gone is on at CUAG until May 4. Admission is free.
Featured image by Julia DeJong/The Charlatan.
