Kasper Feyrer | Turn Toward

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Kasper Feyrer, "O'on, video still (detail)," 2022

Courtesy of the Gallery.

Opening Reception: Thursday, October 19 / 7 – 9PM

Vancouver-based artist Kasper Feyrer unfurls a series of works that connect creative research in mycology as a means to understanding care, more-than-human relations, and queer intimacies through visibility and embodiment. Feyrer’s long-standing material engagement in filmmaking uses the camera as an extension of the human sensorium, as a “device through which one can feel time and mirror perception, expanding one’s embodied experience of the world.”

The environment of works in Turn Toward give witness towards and uphold powerful queer ideas of ecology, which inherently demonstrate qualities of lived sensitivity towards more relational ways of being. Turn Toward debuts the film Oon [2022], a haunting mythology of transformation. “Oon” is the phonetic root form of the word “egg” - suggesting a more cosmic interrogation of self-concepts and emergent identities through metaphors of queerness, birth, growth, sexuality and embodiment, death and loss.

Shown alongside the film, Feyrer has produced a series of sculptural works made of mycelium from the Artist’s Conk [Ganoderma applanatum], a decomposer-fungi which plays an important role in the cycling of nutrients through forest ecologies. The sculptures were composed and cultivated in Feyrer’s studio, which doubles as a mushroom cultivation lab.

In a further series of works, the practical tools of mushroom cultivation−such as liquid cultures, petri dishes, and chemistry glass−are reformed into imaginal objects, inspiring the scenographic backdrop for a future iterative filmwork. A series of cyclical hourglass wheels are additionally presented, made in collaboration with SFU Chemistry glassblower Lucas Clarke. Each hand-blown glass wheel is a self-contained time keeping device, keeping time instead of telling it.

Turn Toward poetically transcribes a cultural understanding of the aliveness and associative resonances of fungi as collaborators: realized through a network of artworks within an impermanent, living timeline; breaking the dualities of subject and object through de-centering human ontologies.

Extending affirmative and regenerative symbolism towards transgender allegories, Kasper Feyrer’s exhibition Turn Toward shares knowledge learned from their ongoing collaboration with fungi, explorations in the materiality of flameworked glassblowing, and installations which serve as sets for future filmic projects.