SLOW HOPE
28 NOVEMBER 2019 – 25 JANUARY 2020
Alexander Boynes and Mandy Martin
Artists Alexander Boynes and Mandy Martin have collaborated over the last six years on four large public exhibitions addressing the issue of climate change. Their current project is ‘Hi-Vis Futures’, at the Canberra Museum and Gallery until 4 February 2020. ‘Slow Hope’ at Beaver Galleries is a parallel and complementary exhibition, prompted in part by a seminal essay of the same name by Christof Mauch. In a call to ‘rethink ecologies of crisis and fear’, Mauch beseeches us to believe in our power, individually and in populations, to make millions of small gestures to mitigate our carbon footprint and avert full-blown catastrophe. In the ‘Still’ series Mandy Martin pushes her signature cooling towers to the distance, coating them with hi-vis paint, sending some into oblivion behind the mountain mists of the ash forest. Tree ferns, here sprouting, there withering, seem to battle poisonous emissions. Mandy’s delicate oil representations are love letters and messages of hope to the forest, unable to escape the smoke, but frailly enduring as a complex organisms.
Slow Hope: Rethinking Ecologies of Crisis and Fear by Christoph Mauch
An exhibition of hope for triumph over disaster by Sasha Grishin for The Canberra Times
