Organic Minimalism: New Bodies of Knowledge brings together seven compelling artistic voices from across Canada in a show that challenges how we observe, think about and re-create the "natural." We ask: How is the natural object perceived? What is the nature of the thing?
While the formal language of Minimalism originated through industrial processes, the world of machines and technology, Organic Minimalism: New Bodies of Knowledge presents a 21st-century minimalist aesthetic grounded in objects and phenomena that can be found or are produced in nature. In this exhibition the formal tropes of cycles, seriality and time are used to re-focus our attention on the way humans construct versions of nature to perform culture upon them and to create narratives about transience, decay, becoming, violence, growth, loss, and the emergence of beauty.
Jan Troost, redacting Michael Fried's famous 1967 essay on Minimalism, "Art and Objecthood," writes, "Minimal Art necessarily includes the beholder. It is large, confronting and creates a distance and space that includes the beholder as a public... Its human size, inspiration in people and nature, betray it as anthropomorphic, biomorphic. Its nature is theatrical." The imperative of Organic Minimalism is inscribed by the drama of the natural in our historical moment. The patterns of exchange between the human and the natural world are of deep importance to understand and visualize.