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Worried Earth: Eco-Anxiety and Entangled Grief
Erica Mendritzki, Curator Melanie Zurba, Assistant Curator

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Port Loggia Gallery, 1107 Marginal Rd.

Group exhibition

Worried Earth: Eco-Anxiety and Entangled Grief is an art exhibition and affiliated program exploring how worry about climate change and ecological collapse is seeping into our lives and dreams, mixing with other fears and anxieties, and entangling with personal experiences of loss. In this ecosystem of grief, art is a place for picturing and shaping bad feelings, including bad feelings about the very act of making art. Each gesture of making is weighed against the desire to do no harm—and the impossibility of a harmless human life within the context of our extractive capitalist system. We grieve our own existence, as well as our eventual demise.

The works in this exhibition sit with and in this grief. They also sing of the ways that grief can open us up. We become capacious, raw, and changeable. We can follow our grief towards wilder and deeper feelings, towards greater empathy for the other beings with whom we share the planet, and towards and into the rhythms of life and death.

Worried Earth features the work of artists Connie Chappel, Luke Fair, Laura Findlay, Natalie Goulet, Maureen Gruben, Jenine Marsh, Kuh Del Rosario, and Xiaojing Yan.

The exhibition is supported by the New Frontiers in Research Fund, and is part of an interdisciplinary research project on eco-anxiety and climate change-related grief. This research project is led by Co-Principal Investigators Melanie Zurba (Dalhousie University) and Erica Mendritzki (NSCAD University) with collaborators Andrew Park (University of Winnipeg), Roberta Woodgate (University of Manitoba), David Busolo (University of New Brunswick), and Lisa Binkley (Dalhousie University). The work is also supported by Research Associate Polina Baum-Talmor, and research assistants and graduate students: Lily Barraclough, Sara Boyd, Morgan Brimacombe, Luke Fair, Natalie Goulet, and Bryanne Lamoureux.