Jill Ho-You
Artist speculates about environmental collapse by growing mould and bacteria.

Jill Ho-You, “Retrograde,” 2019
etching, bacterial culture and mixed media, installation detail (photo by Aran Wilkinson-Blanc, courtesy of the artist)
Chief Seattle of the Suquamish and Duwamish nations is often quoted as having said: “Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” Now, 166 years later, destruction of ecosystems and accelerating climate instability make those words prophetic.
What happens when nature’s web ruptures and the environment collapses? Jill Ho-You, an assistant professor at the Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, offers a thoughtful, complex, yet moving response.
Her print-based exhibition, Latent Monuments, on view until Oct. 3 at Harcourt House, an artist-run centre in Edmonton, is a speculative vision of the decline of the Anthropocene – and humanity’s collective future.
Jill Ho-You, “Latent Monuments,” 2020
installation view showing “Latent Monuments,” 2020, etching, bacterial culture and mixed media on five plinths, and “Obstruction,” 2020, CMYK silkscreen, hand-cut digital (photo by Jacek Malec)
A collapsing fence catches one’s initial attention. It spans the length of the gallery and turns out to be a digital silkscreen Ho-You cut out by hand during four months of painstaking labour. Titled Obstruction, it symbolically frames the exhibition and sets the scene: the fence is an utterly ineffective barrier for invisible threats.
The eponymous central installation consists of five plinths acting as monuments to society, industry, human health, ecosystems and biodiversity. Each is laden with Petri dishes lined with etchings that have been coated with agar, a jelly-like substance that scientists use to grow bacteria and other micro-organisms. The agar, derived from seaweed, has been swabbed with samples from various sources, whether human, animal or industrial.
In other words, this art is alive: bacteria and mould are growing in the dishes. Nobody, not even the artist, knows what it will look like in a few weeks. Some samples may dry out, leaving images warped and exposed. Others may become overgrown. Time, chance and natural forces collaborate to create this work.
Most of the etchings – grouped according to plinth themes, they illustrate manufactured elements as well as flora and fauna, including endangered organisms – were still visible when I saw the show. Perhaps the most stirring depict abandoned industrial fragments and crumbling urban infrastructure. It’s a dystopian scene; a nightmarish vision of concrete and steel structures slowly being smothered by mould.
The inspiration for these etchings was a series of trips Ho-You took to Detroit. Once America’s fourth largest city and home to a thriving automotive industry, Detroit now has a sky-high unemployment rate. Some neighbourhoods have become so run down that houses can cost as little as a dollar each.

Jill Ho-You, “Retrograde,” 2019
etching, bacterial culture and mixed media, installation detail (photo by Aran Wilkinson-Blanc, courtesy of the artist)
The invisible economic and social changes that led to Detroit’s depopulation may portend the future of other cities. As Ho-You’s work points out, environmental calamities not only put pristine wilderness at risk, but civilization itself.
The interconnected systems that sustain the environment, as well as society and human health, are fraying. Ho-You echoes Chief Seattle’s warning with work that explores the potential for human-driven climate change to unravel the invisible web that keeps life in equilibrium. ■
Jill Ho-You: Latent Monuments at the Harcourt House Artist Run Centre in Edmonton from Aug. 21 to Oct. 3, 2020.
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Harcourt House Artist Run Centre
10215 112 Street - 3rd flr, Edmonton, Alberta T5K 1M7
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