Megan Kammerer
7. Anoxic Memory
Visual Arts Centre of Clarington
February 4 - April 23, 2023
Curated by: Megan Kammerer
Artist: Maria Simmons
Installation: TJ Ediger
Production Support: Ingrid Bjørnaali and Michelle Bosvald
Photo Documentation: LF Documentation
Researcher and poet Abbi Flint describes peatland as a place of contestation and contradiction. From the dangerous to the health-restoring, the real to the imagined, the extractable to the preserved—we can find our past and present entangled in the mire. Canada houses 25% of the world’s peatlands, storing its highest density of these carbon-rich landscapes across Northern Ontario. Maria Simmons reconstructs these magical spaces, transforming the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington into an active peat mire ripe with the natural biology and fantastical mythos found among its layers.
You encounter the bog’s primary three strata, spread across each floor of the exhibition space. You enter the mire through the Anoxic Layer—the deepest depths of the bog, where memories are buried. Keepsakes are submerged in this layer, actively pressurized in carboys, preserved, and transformed. Bog biology and human myth-making meet in the Oxic Layer where Simmons isolates the frequencies of a baby’s cry into an unfamiliar drone that pulls visitors up through the gallery. You surface at the Atmospheric Layer—a place of contemplation, where memories can be released as opposed to submerged.
Anoxic Memory provides a hospitable setting where different organisms can grow, meet, affect, recall, and preserve. It asks us to consider our relationship with memory and how this relationship can shift over time. Simmons’ work positions us upon our depleted planet and reminds us of that which sustains us despite our extractions. It questions if we can be preserved or whether our experiences are destined to become unplaced artifacts scattered about the depths of the earth. The nature of memory is frightening, but in its precarity, may we find all that makes life possible.
Anoxic Memory is organized by the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington with the support of the Ontario Arts Council.