School of Art Gallery presents Moving Matter: Between Rock and Stone

Moving Matter: Between Rock and Stone

KC Adams, Kristina Banera, Katherine Boyer, Evin Collis, Jason de Haan, Patrick Dunford, Kara Hamilton, Vanessa Hyggen, Mariana Muñoz Gomez, Jeff Thomas, Lisa Stinner-Kun, Christopher Wahl, and Tricia Wasney

Curated by Abigail Auld, Guest Curator

August 11 to October 14, 2022

Reception: Thursday, September 22, 5:00-8:00 pm

Moving Matter: Between rock and stone is an exhibition about Tyndall limestone, a building material quarried from a 450-million-year-old body of rock. The exhibition pairs research about the material’s transformation from bedrock to building stone with artwork contemplating quarry ecologies, construction’s role in nation-building, and various personal and cultural histories embodied in this stone.

Moving Matter features work by 13 contemporary artists, including several new commissions, ranging from photography, sculpture, drawing, beadwork, jewellery, and video with sound. Some artists contemplate how Tyndall Stone’s rise to prominence as a trademarked building material mirrored the redefinition and construction of the wider region as Western Canada. Others explore the cyclical motion of rock formation and decay, the voids left by excavation, and the interrelation of bedrock and other parts of the environment.

A series of public programs throughout the fall will bring artists and invited guests into conversation to consider how the connection to bedrock shapes orientations to place, how stories endure through the materiality of stone, and how the movement of material links landscapes and cities forever transforming the world.

The curator gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Manitoba Arts Council to present this exhibition and adjunct programming. A special thanks to Gillis Quarries Ltd. for their assistance in the development of artist commissions and the Winnipeg Architecture Foundation for their support of Tyndall Stone research.

Thank you to Sketchfab for supporting this exhibition.

Mariana Muñoz Gomez, A volar entre rocas, installation: digital prints, Tyndall stone, paint, text.

Adjunct Programming:

Registration opening soon!

Virtual Panel

KC Adams, Mariana Muñoz Gomez, and Graham Young: Orienting Self, Place, and History  

Thursday, September 15, 7:00-8:30 pm CDT

Facilitated on Zoom and live-streaming on the School of Art Gallery, University of Manitoba YouTube channel. ASL interpretation and closed captioning are available.

Join Graham Young, Manitoba Museum Curator of Geology and Paleontology, and exhibiting artists KC Adams and Mariana Muñoz Gomez for a panel exploring different ways to orient oneself to the rock formation from which Tyndall Stone is excavated. Young will locate the Red River Formation in time and geologic history, connecting the tropical sea where this rock formed to its current extent across Manitoba and beyond. Adams will speak about her artwork which is materially and relationally grounded in the place when the rock outcropped naturally along the Red River. Muñoz Gomez will discuss their artwork contemplating two rock bodies at either end of Turtle Island—Tyndall Stone and volcanic stone from Morelos, México. These three 20-minute presentations, followed by a Q&A, will offer ways to consider how awareness of this rock formation underground can reorient one’s relationship to time, place, and personal history.

Curatorial Talk

Abigail Auld: Moving Matter: Between Rock and Stone

Thursday, September 22, 12:00-1:00 pm CDT, ARTlab 136

Also facilitated on Zoom and live-streaming on the School of Art Gallery, University of Manitoba YouTube channel. ASL interpretation is available.

Abigail Auld is a writer and curator whose work considers human-altered environments. Her research explores how systems of power and relation are reflected in the way buildings and cities are constructed, with a particular interest in the relationship between urban environments and the ecosystems that sustain them. Abigail holds an MA in Cultural Studies: Curatorial Practice from the University of Winnipeg and a Bachelor of Environmental Design from OCAD University. She lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Treaty 1 territory, as a descendent of British Canadian settlers. Abigail is a founding member of Parameter Press, a collective publishing risograph-printed artist editions, and is currently writing a non-fiction manuscript about Tyndall limestone.

Virtual Guest Lecture

Jane Mah Hutton: Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements 

Thursday, October 6, 7:00-8:30 pm CDT

Facilitated on Zoom and live-streaming on the School of Art Gallery, University of Manitoba YouTube channel. ASL interpretation and closed captioning are available.

Presented in partnership with the Faculty of Architecture, University of Manitoba

Jane Mah Hutton, landscape architect and Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, will give a talk based on her book Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements (Routledge, 2019), which traces five everyday landscape construction materials – fertilizer, stone, steel, trees, and wood – from well-known public landscapes in New York City, back to where they came from. Mah Hutton’s work examines the movement of materials as they pass from production landscapes (plantations, quarries, factories) to designed constructions (buildings, landscapes, infrastructure) through demolition and disposal or re-use. Tracing these transnational material flows will provide a theoretical framework to consider the link between mottled Tyndall Stone buildings in urban environments and the material’s place of origin.

Virtual Panel

Robert Coutts, Vanessa Hyggen, and Tricia Wasney: Material Intimacies: Stories in Stone 

Thursday, October 13, 2022, 7:00-8:30 pm CDT

Facilitated on Zoom and live-streaming on the School of Art Gallery, University of Manitoba YouTube channel. ASL interpretation and closed captioning are available.

Join Robert Coutts, historian and author of Authorized Heritage: Place, Memory, and Historic Sites in Prairie Canada, and exhibiting artists, Tricia Wasney and Vanessa Hyggen, in a panel considering the personal and institutional meanings Tyndall Stone has accumulated through its use in construction. Coutts will discuss how heritage and history-marking are entwined with nationalism, focusing on the commemoration of 19th century limestone construction along the Red River (including Lower Fort Garry). Wasney will speak about her artwork, a narrative jewellery piece exploring the significance of the quarry landscape to her intergenerational history. Hyggen will present about her participatory art project Beads and Stone II at the UofM and of mîkisak ikwa asiniyak | Beads and Stone | Lii rasaad aykwa lii rosh, her 2019 collaboration with Ruth Cuthand at the University of Saskatchewan. These three 20-minute presentations will be followed by a Q&A.

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