Gabi Dao | What breaks on the horizon?

×

Expand

Gabi Dao, “Lucifer falls from Heaven at Dawn,” 2023

digital film still, 21:00 (courtesy of the artist and Unit 17)

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 14, 2023, 7:00 PM  9:00 PM

The figure of the bat is the focal point of Gabi Dao’s solo exhibition What breaks on the horizon? Utilizing dramatic video installations, sculptural interventions, and a new series of ceramic and textile marionettes, Dao considers the bat at a unique set of intersections between ecology and economy, pestilence and good fortune, sight and sound, and alienation and belonging. Utilizing the medium of the marionette, Dao’s bat marionettes are posed throughout the gallery and feature prominently in their videos, drawing upon a long history of puppetry as an educational, satirical, and transgressive dramatic medium.

In the feature video installation Lucifer Falls from Heaven at Dawn, a bat marionette named Lucifer falls to Earth at the foot of Turtle Mountain in Blairmore, Alberta. The collapsed limestone mountain is a shattered backdrop for Lucifer’s journey through the vestiges of resource extraction and settler colonialism on the prairies. Lucifer’s journey moves over land and through time on a journey to find the Others, the other bat species that Lucifer seeks to reconnect with. Along the way, Lucifer encounters biologists who are also searching for the Others but with technologies that heighten their audio and visual abilities.

The videos and the exhibition as a whole not only question how conservation efforts determine what beings deserve our resources and protection, but the intentions of conservation more broadly. Dao points to a tension between the motives of ecological protection and saviourism, critiquing the dominance of Enlightenment thinking, the scientific method, Christian theology, value, and redemption.

Artist Talk: Articulations With Gabi Dao, Saturday, October 14, 2023 2:00 PM  3:00 PM

Join exhibiting artist Gabi Dao. for an in-person conversation about her exhibition What breaks on the horizon?