9 February – 28 April 2024
Opening reception: 7-9 pm, Thursday 8 February 2024
Artist Talk: 6.30 pm, Thursday 11 April 2024
Needful Stones investigates the sometimes-cold relationship we have with rock and stone through a series of lithographic prints, intaglio prints and drawings.
Jonathan Green has long thought of lithography as a collaboration between stone and human. To print from the stone is to learn it’s quirks, it’s subtle responses or come across ‘ghosts’ of it’s history. The variegated texture of Manitoban Tyndall stone, believed to be created by creatures burrowing through the mineral, promises even more interaction – an inhuman agency. It demonstrates participation in what Jeffery Jerome Cohen has termed “an ecology of human-lithic enmeshment” (Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman, 2015). Meaning, a relationship in which rock and human a/effect each other. This implies a boundary between animate life and inanimate life that is more permeable than we currently imagine.
The stones in these artworks are propped up, or, “shored up” as if the artist is trying to align or assist them through crude means. By working with stone, and of stone, Green is collaborating with a cold but (perhaps) sympathetic companion. One that has seen catastrophe before. More than simply inert resources to extract, copper and stone may help guide us through changing notions of time and place. Helping us conceive of blueprints beyond our limited frames of reference in the face of calamity.
CLICK HERE FOR THE EXHIBITION ESSAY
CLICK HERE FOR ARTIST TALK VIDEO WITH ASL INTERPRETATION.
TYNDALL STONE FOSSIL IDENTIFICATION CHART
We asked local artist, Chantal Dupas to draw some of the common fossils found in Tyndall Stone for an identification chart. So, when you happen to pass by a building with some fossils in the Tyndall Stone you will be able to greet them by name! Click on the image below to download the chart to your phone or come by the gallery and pick up a poster– only a limited number available!
Images above:
Left: detail from Little Mountain Quarry return, 2023. Lithography, 11.5″ x 13″.
Right: detail from Transference, 2018. Intaglio, 21″ x 36″.