TREE MUSEUM
NEAR DWELLERS
C0-HOSTED WITH STREET ROAD ARTISTS' PROJECT SPACE:
A MULTI-PART ART & RESEARCH PROJECT THAT EXPLORES ANIMAL-HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS WITH A FOCUS ON THE SPACES AND PLACES WE SHARE
NEAR DWELLERS AS INDWELLERS
PART 6:
OCTOBER 1 - DECEMBER 16 2025
In collaboration with Bothkinds Project Space in Vancouver, the University of British Columbia and Emily Carr University of Art + Design, this group show, workshops, and guest speakers series, explores questions such as: How are we to understand the urban confluence of multispecies presence and place? Are there perhaps other ways to know and indeed, embody urban spaces offered by animals? And if so, what are the “possibilities for a more equitable multispecies city, a task that is particularly important for those species that are in some way tied or drawn to specific city places, and perhaps especially, in these perilous times, for those whose future is endangered”?
TREE MUSEUM
NEAR DWELLERS
AS ROADKILL
PART 5:
FEBRUARY 15 – MAY 31 2025
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Artist Lou Florence fixes our attention on what is publicly deemed out of sight and indeed, out of mind: Roadkill. In her paintings, fur, skin, or feathers, entrails, and limbs are surrounded by a field of a subtle candy colour that turns this grizzly subject into a memorial of sorts, beckoning us to not only reflect upon but also quietly mourn the reality of the harms that are visited on the multitude of more-than-human lives with whom we collide. Florence also extends these acts of compassion to guided tours along a deadly highway (Route 41) in Pennsylvania, USA.
NEAR DWELLERS AS URBANITES
PART 4:
MAY 3 2024 - JANUARY 1 2025
Artists Doug LaFortune and Jesse Garbe focus our attention on the visual representation of animals, and what this tells us about the legacy of differing Indigenous and Colonial cultural attitudes to the more-than-human world. In light of the environmental turbulence with which we are all faced, how do symbols of animals, and/or images of animals as expressions of joy and love, inform our understanding of more-than-human beings within rapidly expanding urban environments?
NEAR DWELLERS AS CREATIVE COLLABORATORS
PART 3:
FEBRUARY 2 - APRIL 13 2024
Artists Julie Andreyev and Ruth K. Burke introduce us to human-animal creative collaborations that seek to foster kinship relations with other critters and wider ecologies. Their art projects press us to engage with more critical questions of the ethics of these relationships and how one might re-imagine animal labour, in the case of Ruth K. Burke's collaborations, and the nature of interspecies reciprocity, in the works of Julie Andreyev. This exhibition asks: What can artists who have co-created art with their companion or neighbouring animals teach us about the ethics of animal-human relations?
NEAR DWELLERS
AS LEGAL BEINGS
PART 2:
OCTOBER 13 - DECEMBER 30, 2023
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Fawn Daphne Plessner’s artworks and Susanna Kamon’s videography attest to animals as political agents in their own right, i.e., to the essential nature of animals as legal beings.
Currently, within Canada's legal system, animals are classified as 'property' – a conception based on English Common Law and one that underpins the workings of the colonial capitalist state. The notion of animals as property also shapes imaginaries of animals as mere "things" that are wholly subject to human needs and desires. In the growing awareness of Indigenous Laws, we learn that the status of animals is not so conceived. All animals are understood as constituting their own nations and this, in turn, encloses humans in a wider matrix of political memberships, social and political obligations, and ethical responsibilities. This exhibition therefore explores the role that aesthetic experiences offer in seeing the critters with whom we reside alongside as political subjects in their own right.
NEAR DWELLERS & THE SHARING OF BREATH
PART 1:
AUGUST 4 - SEPTEMBER 30, 2023
Sarah Le Quang Sang, aka SLQS, and her film, Walking Together, opened Near Dwellers inquiry on human and animal relationships. Her film provocatively and poetically situates us in the midst of a walk with rider and horse as they move through the interstitially urban lands of Walthamstow Marshes, in London, United Kingdom. However, this walk is not a performance of equestrian mastery over one of the most iconic animals in human culture. SLQS draws us into a meditation on the very essence of our connection to other beings: The simple, but often missed act of breathing together.
NEAR DWELLERS
2026
FORTHCOMING PROJECTS
PART 7:
NEAR DWELLERS AS FRIENDS
​AND MORE...
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