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November 24, 2024
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We’re proud to announce our Fall 2025 exhibition WaterWays at the Art Gallery of Sudbury. WaterWays is an exhibition that highlights how watersheds, and water systems, bind humans and the more-than-human, organic and inorganic matter, “animate” and “inanimate” matter, and spaces, etc., into a social whole constituting unique forms of community. This runs counter to the tendency to decouple, delink, and disconnect rivers from lakes, lakes from streams, humans and other animal subjects from streams, and humans from other material subjects including soils, microscopic matter in soils, and other organic matter that may or may not be “inanimate” but nevertheless exists as "vibrant matter."
Northern Ontario’s Junction Creek Watershed is central to the concepts inherent in the exhibition. Spreadover 329km2, including the territories of the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek and Wahnapitae, the Junction Creek Watershed has five tributaries, with part of the watershed (762m) being located in a downtown core. Even as watersheds are critical to drinking water access, recreation, wildlife mobility, and local and regional economies, this urban part of Junction Creek is often a stealth presence. The exhibition, if nothing else, underlines how matter, including humans, are linked and connected in intra-dependent ways to the watersheds upon which every human on the planet lives.
The exhibition, WaterWays, showcases the interdisciplinary work of a.field, a design research practice based in Montréal. Five a.field pieces constituting the exhibition exemplify a.field's embrace of situated practice. For a.field, situated practice brings to the surface the ways that learning in company, (i.e., in social ways) makes design unfold in the ways that it unfolds.
