Another Family Compact (after Robert Gourlay). 2025
Raw Grand River clay, wax resist, wood, copper, wheat paste, photographs
The text is from Scottish Land Reformer Robert Gourlay’s 1822 ‘Statistical Account of Upper Canada’, published after a survey of its citizens and forums throughout the province.
In these papers Gourlay discusses land use, privatization, and its relationship to poverty and social responsibility. Gourlay speaks of the privatization of land, the speculation on it, and the extraction of ‘idle wealth’ by landowners as the culprits for poverty in the province.
Gourlay’s account provides scathing reports on Upper Canada’s private and public governing culture (The Family Compact) who acted largely out of self-interest and with widespread cronyism and corruption at the root of planning decisions.
This Family Compact laid the foundations of the relationships that exist between governing officials, family developers, and corporate capital in the Province of Ontario. Currently these insular relationships couldn’t be more blatantly on display.
Gourlay continued, “... oligarchy, which can fill four seats out of five in our house of commons, at pleasure; men, who have no feeling for the poor, or even for those in middle rank; men who are heedless of everything like virtue; who tax us, only to squander away the immense resources of the empire, to support themselves and their friends..”
see more in the comments below
(We are so small, yet we create such big change, and it’s so hard not to be human-centric with everything.)
I used to pass a large stone on my way to my studio. It's the type of object one circulates around, metaphorically, physically, an anchor and a way to see what else circulates with it.
In 2014 the stone was liberated(?)/stolen(?) from a development site, taken from the crease that forms in a transition of value.
It was sandblasted clean, in the mark-making language of our industrialized lives. Making as an unmaking, and partly a foreshadowing and echo; an intentional removal of biological life and an aestheticizing of form.
It was then installed in a gallery on a bound stack of pine scaffolding planks and titled 'Extinction Event'.
The work goes back to my youth and my family’s history in the study of geology, paleontology, and with observations of the land that surrounds my childhood home.
In 2017, the stone was honoured to be the subject of a ‘Watching Rocks’ broadcast by the talented and insightful @m.e.g.h.a.n.p.r.i.c.e , who I’m forever grateful to know.
-A Near-Future Development-
a stone in aggregation
tumbled
before gravity,
between consumptive value,
waste of a different process, for different ends.
(rift)
stripped of mutualistic relationships
turned over, speculated.
Abraded
\
Events for clearing life
Biological, aesthetic
with tools that leave no mark.
and objects modified,
and development sites,
and the glacial deposits of bulldozers
sold by 'Country Greens'
(though neither greens nor country remain)
(among the vanity carpets on desert soil and construction waste)
(a language of process leaving a thick veneer of non-place
on which we construct our world);
and those behaviours that are not of our invention or control,
fall outside of our fabricated paradigms
and I fear in trauma we are stumbling
and have becoming ignorant through our illusions of thinking we are so much.
#stopsprawl #handsoffthegreenbelt
The tiles are unfired. Marked with wax.
Open to new forms, unfixed by fire.
Fugitive.
Propositioning shelter. Declaring distress.
Speaking to leadership, priorities, possibility, and choice.
“The sole source of distress rests in the misapplication of our immense wealth”
words from a collective archive,
of land, arrival, extraction
and systemic ills.
See us. Now, in History,
Fugitive, capable of relocating our minds,
towards things, more common.
-
In 1822, Robert Gourlay returns to discussions on the closure of the commons in Britain. He noted a loss of the basic social provisioning needed for the public in their closures. He was critical of the men who capitalized on these lands as they were also in positions of state power and should have provided provisioning.
Gourlay observed that the wealthy were indignant because they fail to understand that land is about sufficiency, resiliency and community. He concluded that restricting access to the commons were acts against human rights.
His report notes that Upper Canada’s Family Compact shared these same characteristics of cronyism: Willful blindnesses, self-interests above all others, an indifference to corruption and broad incompetencies.
Today in Ontario, there are those with property and capital who decide for the rest of us how land is to be used, who dictate how we build (and therefor, how culture and society forms connections, and disconnections), and who compromise the resiliency of future generations.
Another Family Compact, continuing to extract from sufficiency, community and resiliency.
This system we inherited, and the mentality it brings, is entwined in a social amnesia rooted in class, arrival, disconnections and capitalism's false sense of resiliency and social sovereignty.
This view turns us all into victims (and perpetrators) and it contributes to a numbness we have to so many violences.
The alternative is to heal and reconnect with what this culture has taken from us. To see ourselves in common, in a system overdue for collapse and with a responsibility to claim new priorities for our sufficiency and communities.
I've always had a bit of a battle with being bashful and so I realize that I don't do a great job of sharing some of the projects I've done.
This Learning Pavilion is a design/build I did for the 2022 @torontobiennial . The shelter supported their learning program at 72 Perth, providing an adaptable outdoor space for school groups, discussions and reflections.
Built through snow and rain, tight schedules, complex arrangements and COVID, I was grateful for the opportunity and the crew that pulled behind the project.
The site has since returned to a parking lot but for a time it contributed to grounding a place for connection.
Engineering: @reviveengineering
Build team:
@chisel_and_stone@eh_thorne@joelbeet
Sebastian Butt
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.
.
.
#architecture #design #designbuild #pavilion #wooddesign #timber #structures #architecturedesign #archdaily #canadianart
Join us for our in person Round Table talk featuring artists Mohammad Tabesh and Matt Walker, alongside Nadine Green - Site Coordinator at A Better Tent City!
As part of our exhibition, Beyond the Threshold, we’re hosting a talk tackling Canada’s housing crisis and homelessness. Hear from artists and community leaders using creativity to spark change and uplift voices that need to be heard.
Head over to our "upcoming workshops" link in bio to register on Eventbrite. Don’t delay signing up; these spots fill quickly!
This exhibition and related programming is made possible through the generous support of Armstrong Fine Art Services and a special anonymous donor. We gratefully acknowledge their contributions to bringing this project to life.
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#artisttalk #talk #freeevents #KWawesome #KitchenerWaterloo #KitchenerWaterlooEvents #WaterlooRegion #roundtabletalk
@create_waterloo@uptownwaterloo@explorewaterlooregion@waterloowellingtonnetwork@cfifekw@bardish_chagger@armstrongfineartservices
Entanglement, sands and water, atmospheres and curiosity. Grateful for this time away with Mom sharing stories, and the layers of our life’s lessons. I’m so thankful for having such a patient, wise, generous and supportive guide.
Northern Territories, Australia
So much to reflect on while accompanying @brandileewhat on research in Kakadu for the Mirarr (Traditional Owners of Jabiluka) during this trip.
The rock shelters here have 65,000 years of continuous occupation recorded in them, stunning and active rock painting throughout the area.
This trip has been filled with beauty, generous and creative souls, and a lifetime of lessons and insights.
Much meaning for me personally has formed as I traced some of the narrative lines of my family who arrived in the 1930s ahead of war in Europe.
There’s so much to sort through and I will post more later but feeling grateful and humbled by the past month.
Our bodies can reveal things about the world that the mind may struggle to understand. This consciousness, shared and inhabited in all things, lays beyond language and reveals the deep and interconnected realities of life in physical existence.
Burls form as a part of a tree’s energy system, they are the physical manifestation of the stresses of their life and the interactions between bodies.
The work ‘deeper bodies’ explores the forms they communicate with us as relational beings and asks us to seek an empathetic relationship with those bodies whose languages we’ve lost some ability to hear.
There’s still time this weekend to see these, and the other great works along the Burlington Waterfront Sculpture Trail, Burlington, Ont. Closing June 2nd.
Last weekend to see 𝔖𝔭𝔞𝔠𝔢 𝔅𝔢𝔱𝔴𝔢𝔢𝔫 with @michaelallgoewer and myself @theassemblygallery . Such a pleasure to have been invited to exhibit alongside an artist with such thoughtful presence and with whom I’ve shared aesthetic and material sensibilities with for so long.
My work in the exhibition is an exploration of the spaces we dominate but are absent from relationship in, and the foreboding runaway momentum of the systems we have ended up with.
What can be done with the vestiges of our colonial/capitalist world? What does habitat, shelter and land look like to those who will follow us and those who occupy it with us? Can unearthing our sense of deeper time unlock alternative forms for us to consider?
1. 𝓦𝓱𝓪𝓽 𝔀𝓲𝓵𝓵 𝓽𝓱𝓮𝔂 𝓶𝓪𝓴𝓮 𝓸𝓯 𝓾𝓼, 2024.
Phragmites, Tobacco drying sticks, unprocessed clay, iron oxide, cast iron, shells, ash, stones
2. 𝓒𝓸𝓵𝓵𝓲𝓼𝓲𝓸𝓷 (𝓸𝓷𝓬𝓸𝓶𝓲𝓷𝓰), 2024.
Cyanotype. Wall mounted with Nori glue
3. Collecting Phragmites.
4. Close up of double sided, Iron cast, pine cone with phyllotaxis pattern
#phragmites #mud #commodityfutures #sculpture #canadianart #canadianartist #installation #thirdspace #shelter #wip
Detail of 𝓦𝓱𝓪𝓽 𝔀𝓲𝓵𝓵 𝓽𝓱𝓮𝔂 𝓶𝓪𝓴𝓮 𝓸𝓯 𝓾𝓼, a new work in 𝔼𝕢𝕦𝕒𝕝 𝕋𝕚𝕞𝕖, @theassemblygallery , exhibition opening tomorrow, Sunday, April 7th, 2-5.
So thankful for @michaelallgoewer for inviting me to install work alongside him. Exhibitions runs through the month of April. Hope you can make it out!
#newwork #sculpture #installation #phragmites #charcoal #mud #oxide #castiron #highways #hydrocorridors #collisionwithourfuture
