To launch her residency at UBC, Vancouver artist Holly Schmidt presents Forecast, a series of daily weather forecasts installed on the windows of the AHVA Gallery over the course of Congress 2019. Printed on vinyl with a mirror finish, Forecast reflects the shifting weather conditions outside the gallery. Rather than predicting the weather, the forecasts use the language of weather reporting to anticipate the highly localized effects of weather on humans, plants and animals on campus. This will be the first of many poetic weather forecasts written by the artist and broadcast on the soon-to-be-launched website vegetalencounters.ca. Forecast is part of the exhibition …we can know more than we can tell… (Polanyi, 1958), curated by Christine D’Onofrio. The exhibition seeks to actualize intuitive dimensions of knowledge that happen both through experiential learning and the research and creation of artworks.
Vegetal Encounters is Holly Schmidt’s multi-year residency with the Outdoor Art Program at the University of British Columbia. Through this residency, Schmidt will creatively engage with plant life as a significant source of life, connection and learning. The artist suggests that learning with plant life involves slowing down and using all of the senses to engage deeply and with respect. As part of her residency, she anticipates creating opportunities for students, staff and faculty on campus to attend to the plants around them. This engagement will result in a range of art projects in various mediums and of different durations.
Holly Schmidt is an artist, curator and educator who engages processes of embodied research, collaboration and informal pedagogy to explore the multiplicity of human relations with the natural world. Her work involves the creation of temporary site-specific projects and residencies, along with material-based explorations in the studio. Her national and international exhibitions, projects and residencies include: Vegetal Encounters (2019- ) with the UBC Outdoor Art Program, Quiescence (2019) at the Burrard Arts Foundation, A-Y with Locals Only (2018) at AKA Gallery, Pollen Index (2016) at the Charles H. Scott Gallery, Till (2014-15) at the Santa Fe Art Institute, Moveable Feast (2012) at the Burnaby Art Gallery and Grow (2011) with Other Sights for Artists’ Projects. Schmidt is grateful to live and work in Vancouver, Canada, the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.
Image (above): Holly Schmidt, Forecast (Screen Capture), 2019. courtesy of the artist.
Images (below): Holly Schmidt, Forecast (installation at Audain Centre), 2019. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Nigel Laing.
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Vegetal Encounters is Holly Schmidt’s three-year residency with the Outdoor Art Program at UBC. Through this residency, Schmidt has been creatively engaging with plant life as a significant source of life, connection and learning.
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Fireweed Fields transforms a UBC lawn site into a fireweed meadow, encouraging increased biodiversity through gradual succession as a metaphor for the resurgence of life after a crisis. This installation acknowledges the global climate emergency: by tearing through the fabric of maintained lawns and colonial ideals, it plants the initial seeds for change and catalyzes dialogue, creative experimentation, and new biodiversity research and learning opportunities.
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In collaboration with the UBC Film Society and screening at The Norm, the Belkin presents a short program of films selected by Holly Schmidt that resonate with Vegetal Encounters, her slow residency in the gallery's Outdoor Art Program. The selected films, Wild Relatives, Fordlandia and Indigenous Plant Diva, engage in multiform ways with questions of presentness, biodiversity and learning from the relationships between human and non-human beings.
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On Sunday, June 20, the summer solstice, we will project Jumana Manna’s film Wild Relatives (64 minutes, 2018) on the Belkin's Outdoor Screen located on the exterior of the gallery's wall along Main Mall, in a conversation across media with Holly Schmidt’s Fireweed Fields. The strange, spasmodic course of space and time in recent months has been mitigated by little other than the changes in seasons, the rhythms of nature, and the communal spaces offered by the outdoors. Seasonal and celestial markers such as that of the solstice bring this collective orientation upward and outward into marked relief. Wild Relatives will screen first at 11 am and then on each odd hour with the last screening at 7 pm.
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As part of Holly Schmidt's Vegetal Encounters residency, the artist has collaborated with Lecturer Bill Pechet and students from UBC’s Environmental Design (ENDS) program, in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture to explore the potential for a mobile structure to support residency programming on campus.
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Students from UBC’s Department of Biology practice botanical drawing – and immersive observation – with artist in residence Holly Schmidt.
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