Press

 As Above, So Below - Gillian King

With this exhibition of new work, Gillian King bears witness to patterns that entangle lifeforms at different scales. A reference to the phrase used in many belief systems, including Tarot, astrology, and sacred geometry, the exhibition’s title invites us to look up and down, to recognize how the microcosm and the macrocosm behave alike, mirroring one other. Equally, it is a call to look around to recognize the myriad ways in which all life on Earth – human and other-than-human – is mutually dependent. On the heels of a global pandemic that lays bare our shared porosities and vulnerabilities and intensifies deadly consequences of interrelated global crises ranging from racial capitalism to climate catastrophe and species extinction, As Above, So Below takes on even greater meaning. It begs us to consider the webs and relations of care that are necessary for all species’ mutual survival and thriving.

An interplay of chaos and control marks each canvas. Ceding some agency to the unpredictability of natural dyeing processes, King collaborates with her materials and their diverse temporalities. Rather than controlling non-human life forms, as is dominant in this era marked by extractivism and anthropocentrism, King honours the agency, life, and death of her collaborators. The dye process for each canvas resulted in a powerful symmetry, above and below, side to side, that echoes patterns in nature. You may recognize these symmetries as natural geometries in our human bodies, moth wings, and pollen, to name a few. You may also recognize familiar textures – ones that stir up images of melting snow, eroding rock, sand, soil, and moss formations on the ground as much as they do images of celestial textures like clouds, stars, and the milky way.

King’s daring use of colour with the playful forms painted upon each dyed canvas further animates the scenes of life webs. Painted shapes in Lamb’s Ear echoes the velvety leaves of the beloved plant of the same name, as well as the ears of lambs themselves. Arachnoid, with its vibrant green lines arching outward also evoke spider-like shapes, resonating with arachnids, spider-plants, and architectural forms alike. Meanwhile, in Alveoli, the reddish cochineal stains evoke the tiny air sacs in our lungs that exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide into our blood stream. Considered together, these works speak and breathe with one another, from gardens to respiratory systems, bubbling with stories of life.

While these paintings conjure up the animacies of all lifeforms, they also demand an engagement with questions of lifecycles and ethical consumption. Being tangled up in webs of belonging and life – especially while we are situated within what Anna Tsing calls “pericapitalist spaces,” those spaces between capitalist and non-capitalist forms – also means being caught up in complex webs of suffering. While some natural dyes were locally sourced and grown by the artist in her own garden or nearby sites, others, such as the carmine dye from cochineal bugs, were exported from Peru, where the female insects are considered invasive and colonize native prickly pear cacti. Other materials, such as the rust sediments, evoke human-made, post-industrial ruins. The materials chosen therefore echo the layered, multispecies assemblages that constitute all bodies on Earth, refusing homogeneity and easy categorization.

In this sense, As Above, So Below – attentive to contamination, care, ethics, alternate temporalities, and the tangling up of all life – rejects the toxicity of what Alexis Shotwell defines as “purity politics.” It offers a refusal of a homogenous, purifiable world that is fixated on progress. How would Anthropocenic relationships to all lifeforms change if all humans looked up, down, and around, rather than ahead? What might it mean to look at the world and its phenomena through a lens of interdependence and mutual care? The works featured here offer useful guides for asking these necessary questions.