Gabi Dao, mineral still, 2022
vinyl
Courtesy of the artist
Gabi Dao’s mineral still is on display at the Walter C. Koerner Library, originally as part of the exhibition The Willful Plot (13 January-16 April 2023); her work will remain at Koerner Library through 4 September 2023.
Gabi Dao’s research-based practice culminates in collage, sculpture, sound and moving image installations. Through non-linear conceptions of memory, time and truth, Dao’s digital scans and methods of compost – garden and kitchen scraps in the process of decay – evoke themes of consumption, globalization, labor, history and time. Much like the process of decomposition that allows new life to flourish, Dao recomposes her source material to create a new installation for the Koerner Library that links to her collage and film work in the Belkin exhibition The Willful Plot. The large-scale image of compost encourages viewers to ruminate on the cycles of their own histories in order to embrace the meanings they make for themselves.
The Willful Plot brings together artists’ practices to expand the notion of the garden as a site of tension between wild and cultivated, temporal and perpetual, public and private, sovereign and colonized. Here, the garden is considered by the artists not only as a delineated patch of earth, but as a story and a will to drive that story to complicate the way in which cultures and individuals see themselves in relation to ecology, sociality, belief and possibility. It is an opportunity to look at human relationships with land, flora, fauna and their interrelatedness. In its willfulness, the resistance garden is a counter-site, a heterotopia for alternative cultivation and potential transformation.
This installation is a collaboration of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the Walter C. Koerner Library at the University of British Columbia made possible by the generous support of the Audain Foundation. Art in the Library offers new perspectives on contemporary art by presenting art that questions our current perceptions about the world around us.
Gabi Dao, mineral still, 2022, installed at the UBC Walter C. Koerner Library. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography
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