Abbas Akhavan, Tanya Busse, Liljana Mead Martin: Stone Witness
to
Nanaimo Art Gallery 150 Commercial Street, Nanaimo, British Columbia V9R 5G6
Join us for the Opening on Friday, November 29, 7 PM
In rocky mounds, boulders, and cliffs, when shadows fall, where lichen grows, where cracks appear, we can see faces. However grotesque, we see ourselves. This optical, even romantic form of mimesis, this desire to see ourselves in the stony landscape, also has scientific grounding: in minerals, as we are made of them.
This empathy with the land has limits. What do shareholders and mine operators perceive as they level entire mountains? How are we reflected in tar sands operations that move more sediment in a year than all of the world's rivers combined? How do we understand the discrepancies between those who profit from extraction and those who feel the effects? Who is burdened with the role of witnessing and how much can they endure? We project our visages onto the land, but a Stone Witness sees it differently and can give testimony for millennia.