↳ Exhibitions

Jennifer Rose Sciarrino at Mercer Union

September 1, 2019

Artist: Jennifer Rose Sciarrino

Exhibition title: from root to lip

Curated by: Julia Paoli

Venue: Mercer Union, Toronto, Canada

Date: June 22 – August 10, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Mercer Union

Making kin is perhaps the hardest and most urgent part.[1]

from root to lip presents Jennifer Rose Sciarrino’s formal inquiry into the notions of entanglement and techno-organic hybridity that have long been tended to by feminist writers of critical thought and science fiction. In a series of sculptures referencing biotic matter—seeds, spores, cells, pollen, bacteria and yeast—Sciarrino interprets scientific imaging and illustration of such phenomena towards new fictions in blown glass and carved stone.

Posed at the tips of long steel armatures that twist and bend towards one another, these budding figures emerge from a low-lying platform that anchors this environment. Here, Sciarrino figures the dazzling morphology of the less-than-visible biota through shifts of scale and substance, architecting anew the relational space between human and nonhuman actors vital to a living world.

How might artistic practice approach post-anthropocentric imaginings to provide compelling alternatives to those shaped by current rhetoric surrounding the Anthropocene? Beginning with the suggestion that exchange is a promise latent in adjacency, from root to lip advocates for a distributed, entangled future that is grounded in synchronicity and co-becoming.

Jennifer Rose Sciarrino’s sculpture, video, and installation works consider the living world through its entanglements in nature and technology. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Ruffled Follicles and a Tangled Tongue at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge (2019); and But both are sensitive, Projet Pangée, Montréal (2019). Her work has been included in exhibitions at venues including Art Museum, Toronto (2016); Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto, Mississauga (2015); Jackman Humanities Institute, Toronto (2015); Oakville Galleries (2015); Bâtiment d’art Contemporain, Genèva (2014); Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina (2014); and The Power Plant, Toronto (2011, 2013), among others. Sciarrino lives and works in Toronto, and is represented there by Daniel Faria Gallery.

Jennifer Rose Sciarrino would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $ 153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Works in the exhibition have been produced with the support of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council, and the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council.

Julia Paoli is the Director of Exhibitions & Programs at Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art.

[1] Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities1 May 2015; 6 (1): 165.