PLANET EARTH S.O.S.
House on Fire reminds us climate change is making the world ‘hotter than Harry Styles’
Raegan Moynes had a problem. The weight of a dozen or so shirts on hangers was too much for a made-in-china clothing rack to handle.
Rather than build extra supports for the buckled frame, Moynes let it be. The plastic and metal rods splay out from a pile of red floral print, blue checks and beige lace.
This is “a kind of perfect metaphor for where we’re at. We’re on the floor,” said Amy Snider, a student artist and curator of House on Fire, the exhibition on view at the University of Regina’s Fifth Parallel gallery.
Moynes’ piece is called Threshold, and the artist describes it as “a symbol of the earth and its limitations as it addresses an escalating population and the planet’s inability to sustain it.”
There are 12 artists contributing to this show, which is focused entirely on the environment and climate change.
Its title is inspired by Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenage climate activist who told the World Economic Forum last year, “Our house is on fire.”
It includes a series of satirical posters by Ulrike Veith that advertise travel to Planet B, and eating plastic as a way to cure ill health.
There’s Van Gonzales’s sculpture of a miniature climate strike, featuring gummy bear replicas holding tiny signs — with messages including “the Earth is getting hotter than Harry Styles,” and “how will we throw shade if there are no trees?”
A tub of cheese puffs is on a pedestal. Snider purchased the snack at Costco, while considering news that Australian wildfires have killed more than 1 billion animals.
It encapsulates the disconnect between humans and the environment, Snider said:
“We’re now at the point where we’re buying enormous plastic containers of cheese balls while the planet is at once burning and melting.”
Snider’s other contributions to the exhibition are series of ceramic cups that represent melting glaciers, which partially constitute our freshwater supply.
Delicate and white, some appear to be melting into puddles.
Others literally are disintegrating in water.
Christine Ramsay made five pastel drawings centred on a dead robin.
“Its population numbers are just completely decreasing,” said Ramsay, a post-bac student and a film professor at the U of R.
Her pieces are about “the sense of nature and us all, humans, having to face imminent crisis around populations declining, and our own fate with floods and fires with global warming."
Snider hopes the exhibition will get people thinking and talking about climate change, “the pinnacle issue of our time” and something too many people brush off.
She said she has found House on Fire an inspiring process. Engaging with the other artists, who “have so much invested in these issues,” made her feel hopeful — “and I almost never do,” Snider said.
An art exhibition of bloody tears, polystyrene debris and sculptures of whales with plastic-filled stomachs might elicit despair. That’s why Snider wanted to leave people with avenues for action.
Near the gallery’s exit, there is information about Fridays For Future and Envirocollective — both groups that foster activism and education around climate change — and the 100-per-cent Renewable Regina forum on Feb. 29, 1 p.m. at Westminster United Church.
“I know I feel a lot better when I’m in the Envirocollective meetings with a group of people who all care. It’s a nice reprieve from normally being surrounded by people who refuse to think about this problem we’re facing,” Snider said.
House on Fire is on at Fifth Parallel, in the U of R Rid dell Centre, through Feb. 14. It features works by W.L. Altman, Émily Beaupréwalsh, Tiffany Favreau, Van Gonzales, Madeleine Greenway, Reagan Moynes, Jeff Meldrum, Margaret Orr, Erickka Patmore, Christine Ramsay, Amy Snider, and Ulrike Veith.
We’re now at the point where we’re buying enormous plastic containers of cheese balls while the planet is at once burning and melting