Выставка в галерее искусств Неймейма посвящена влиянию климатических изменений на природу

New exhibition in Nanaimo Art Gallery focusing on effects of climate change Published 5:30 am Thursday, August 13, 2026 A new Nanaimo Art Gallery exhibition is focusing on the effects of climate change. Biophilia opened on Aug. 1 and will be running until Oct. 11. The exhibition was curated by Marianne Cloutier and Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre, and is produced and circulated by Musée d’art de Joliette, an art museum located north of Montreal. Jesse Birch, Nanaimo Art Gallery curator, told the News Bulletin that the exhibit fit with the theme of this year’s showcases, answering the question, “How can we live together?” “So it seemed like a very good fit for this question when we see an exhibition that’s all about how we reconcile with the fact that we are part of nature, but we exploit it often to the point of harm,” Birch stated. The artists involved with the exhibition are Zheng Bo, Montserrat Duran Muntadas, Jumana Manna, Katherine Melançon, Joshua Schwebel, and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun. “I think that’s one of the strengths of this exhibition, it brings together viewpoints that people in Nanaimo might not be able to see otherwise,” Birch added. Melançon’s art piece, named Towards a Parliament of the Living VI – Black Diamond Dust, is created through coal, ferns, monitors, microcontrollers, sensors, fern scans, visual programming, earth and cast glass. “This is a version of an artwork that is being shown six different times, and each time it is shown, it reflects a place in which it was shown. So, the artist uses digital sensors to read different things in the environment and bring them into the installation,” Birch said. The sensors are located on a fern on the installation, one of them on a tap in the art gallery, one in the trees and plants at the Wildwood Ecoforest in Cedar, and one in the server room, where all the digital interfaces are connected. During Melançon’s research for the exhibition, she had a conversation with Snuneymuxw elder Geraldine Manson, in which they talked about the plants, which were important to the Snuneymuxw. In addition, Nanaimo Art Gallery partnered with the Ecoforestry Institute Society, who takes care of Wildwood Ecoforest, in order to help with producing the artwork. The plants that are in the artwork all have to be taken care of, something which Melançon had helped to instruct the art gallery staff to do. “She’s worked with a gardener in the past … she selected more hardy ferns that would survive here, but also she told us … ‘OK so this is how much you should water it,’ she got some grow lights, so every night we bring grow lights out and we put [them] on, so it has a sort of false natural light, but they seem to be doing OK so far,” Birch said. “We’re used to caring for artworks, we’re just not used to caring for living artworks.” He stated that the art relates to the overall Biophilia exhibit, as there is a contradiction in society’s relationship with the plants. “This work speaks to this sort of deep history of that in the sense that ferns are part of the biomass that have been compressed over time to create coal. Coal, of course, fuelled the industrial revolution, which was the beginning of the real acceleration of our destruction of the environment, that is leading towards climate change,” Birch explained. Some coal in the art display comes from the Drummond Mine in Nova Scotia, as well as Nanaimo’s own No. 1 Mine. Birch said that he thinks a lot of people are going to love the exhibition, as it contains different types of media, from sculpture to video, in addition to different points of view. “It has something for everyone, and it also has a lot of moments where, I think, curiosity will be sparked,” Birch added. [email protected]