Amalgamate
July 13 - September 1, 2019
Mantle, with Diyan Achjadi, Sean Alward, Tsēmā Igharas, and Kevin Michael Murphy at the Art Gallery of Evergreen
Amalgamate comes out of a recent project for which I documented the journey of a slab of granite, starting with its extraction from a quarry on Hardy Island, to its transportation by barge to Delta and finally its pending transformation at a stonecutter’s in Coquitlam. This inquiry revealed a multiplicity of human entanglements with stone and surfaced questions about the dynamic time-based formation of stone, Indigenous and settler colonial histories on the West Coast and the multiplicity of material-based knowledges situated in stone. It also brought me to a material by-product of the stone-cutting process. Continuous streams of water are needed to cool the large saws as they cut through the rock, which produces a grey mud when filtered. Invented alchemical processes were used to transform this mud into a reconstituted stone—or rather a failed attempt at a stone. This work is a reminder that when geological forms are removed, they can’t be put back. There is no obvious remediation or restitution.
Amalgamate was made possible with support from the BC Arts Council,
Photo Credit: Rachel Topham