Christina Battle, the air we breathe, video still, 2023

Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography

the air we breathe
Christina Battle

Exhibition Dates: January 6 – February 4, 2023
Opening Reception: January 6, 6:00 – 8:00PM

the air we breathe is an expanded single-channel experimental documentary. The work explores the complexities of air pollution, weaving together themes of environmental catastrophe, cultural and political strife, conspiracy and the various links between. This work imagines the ways environment and culture impact one another in ongoing and cyclical means. Combining research about Edmonton’s air quality with personal storytelling and speculative imaginings, this project deeply considers the complicated means by which our air impacts us–from the physical effects of pollutants to scent and collective memory.

For more information read Gauging the air we breathe with Christina Battle, an essay by curator and art historian Nadia Kurd.

Gallery 44 is pleased to debut a fundraising edition by Christina Battle! Produced as a prelude to Battle’s upcoming exhibition, the edition is an unscented beeswax candle and a recycled pulp coaster, including interactive prompts. Purchase edition today!

The artist would like to thank the Edmonton Arts Council.

Christina Battle is an artist based in amiskwacîwâskahikan, (also known as Edmonton, Alberta), within the Aspen Parkland: the transition zone where prairie and forest meet. Her practice focuses on thinking deeply about the concept of disaster: its complexity and the intricacies that are entwined within it. Much of this work extends from her recent PhD dissertation (2020) which looked closer to community responses to disaster: the ways in which they take shape and especially to how online models might help to frame and strengthen such response.

Christina Battle, the air we breathe from the participatory series Forecast, 2022

Christina Battle in Conversation with Tia-Simone Gardner
Saturday, January 28, 1:00PM – 2:30PM

Join us for a conversation between current exhibiting artist Christina Battle and Tia-Simone Gardner, whose first Canadian solo exhibition, Dark and Perfect Memories, took place at Gallery 44 in September, 2022. Both artists will explore their intersecting research interests, including digital mapping and the complicated relationship between the environment, climate and Black life. The artists will share their work as an expanded element of the ongoing exhibition series exploring relationships to land through the lens of female artists working from different racialized perspectives.

The conversation will occur live on zoom on January 28, and the audio will be shared as a podcast on G44 Digital in February 2023.

For more information on Tia-Simone Gardner’s practice visit the exhibition page for Dark and Perfect Memories and explore her project, The River on G44 Digital.

Tia-Simone Gardner is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and Black feminist scholar. Working primarily with drawing, images, archives and spaces, Gardner traces Blackness in landscapes, above and below the ground’s surface. Ritual, disobedience, geography and geology are spectres and recurring themes in her work. Gardner grew up in Fairfield, Alabama, across the street from Birmingham and learned to see landscape, capitalist extraction and containment, through this place. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Jeff Meldrum, Compensation #1 (the two bears with cheque), 16 x 20 inch, photo captured with Cabela’s trail-cam, 2020

Art for Animals
Jeff Meldrum

Exhibition Dates: January 6 – February 4, 2023
Opening Reception: January 6, 6:00 – 8:00PM
(Vitrines)

Art for Animals features several photographs of so-called wild animals interacting with Jeff Meldrum’s sculptural interventions in the forest. The series reflects Meldrum’s constant journey to establish relationships of care between himself and the animals in the northern region of Saskatchewan. Encompassing gestures of controlled burning, trail cutting and keeping invasive species at bay, Meldrum attempts to make art on the land to arouse the curiosity of the forest animals, facilitate cross-species connection and learn from the animals who call that region home.

Jeff Meldrum is a builder, creator, musician and occasional wilderness dweller whose work within the visual art world often uses satire to diminish the self-congratulatory preeminence of the human species, its innumerable grand experiments and the mythologies it constructs. Meldrum works through an intermedia lens, engaging with photography, sculpture and performance. Living and working in Treaty 4 and 6 Territory in Saskatchewan has instilled in him a strong connection to the land, which has prompted inquiries into animal-human relationships, wild animal cognition and the masculinity present in wilderness/hunting culture.

Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography is an artist-run centre committed to supporting diverse approaches to photographic and image-based practices through exhibitions, education programs and facilitating artistic production. Gallery 44 provides space and context for meaningful dialogue between artists and publics. Together, we offer an entry point to explore the artistic, cultural, historic, social and political implications of the image in our ever-expanding visual world.

Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 120
Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8
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Maegan Broadhurst
Head of Communications and Development
maegan@gallery44.org
416.979.3941