Megan Feniak | In honoured dust

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Megan Feniak, “terrestrial creeper (detail),” 2023

bronze (image courtesy of Chelsea Yang-Smith)

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

In honoured dust assembles Megan Feniak’s recent sculptures of caterpillars, Glacier Lilies, and Cyclocosmia that consider a shared connection between consciousness and the earth. Through the approach of a craftsperson, Feniak depicts these caterpillars, lilies, and trapdoor spiders in laboriously hand-rendered materials of carved wood, cast aluminum, and bronze. Feniak’s detailed depictions of these creatures of the earth both disgust and attract. The negative subconscious stimulation from insects and other ground-dwellers is thought to come from their association with filth, decomposition, and mortality. Considering Feniak’s sculptures, this physic impulse is a bridge to remembering our connection with the ground and the transformations possible within it.

Feniak describes a time while camping when, while lying on the ground, she was at the mercy of a swarm of hundreds of Spongy Moth caterpillars. Subsumed in a flood of the insects, it was as if they thought her to be no different than the rest of the landscape, seemingly unaware of her presence. Based on this experience, Feniak has cast an organically shaped swarm of Spongy Moth caterpillars that envelop an unseen organic shape. Alongside the caterpillars are aluminum casts of the delicate Glacier Lily of the Rocky Mountains. The wildflowers gaze back towards the harsh ground they sprung from, spectral in their brief time on the landscape.

On the wall of the library hangs a ribbed, hand-carved disc with ridges that make it appear as a vague face or a mask. The shape of the carving is derived from the abdomen of the Cyclocosmia, a type of trapdoor spider that uses its uniquely disc-shaped abdomen to plug the opening of its burrow. Its body simultaneously becomes a barrier between above and below and to its unsuspecting prey, just another surface of the earth. Feniak intricately carves the abdomen’s muscles, spines, and grooves with each mark of the chisel. The wood is then dyed with milk paint and earth pigments, an ancient method of using soil to colour the work. In honoured dust is an opportunity to re-attune to the sensations and transformations possible in the subterranean.