Installation view of moveObjects On at The Plumb with Bloom (2021). Images by Alison Postma and courtesy of The Plumb.
moveObjects On
Curated by Emma Green + Alison Postma
The Plumb
Toronto, Canada
September 3 – 29, 2021
Curated by Alison Postma and Emma Green, moveObjects On is an exhibition that teases apart the ways in which we understand ourselves through the capitalist lens. The twenty-four artists in moveObjects On transform The Plumb into a retail-adjacent experience that pieces together the shopping experiences of the gallery’s architectual past with a collectively imagined, and oh so peculiar future.
Reminiscing of the centralised water features common to malls of a bygone era, Hudspith presents Bloom (2021), a site-specific, multimedia, living pond installation made in collaboration with a community of molecular bodies. Inorganic animacies, extra-human subjectivities, and encounters with entropy; Bloom explores the erotic potential of becoming molecular. Stained glass lenses depicting a mixture of algal and human cellular structures emerge ascendant from within a liquid culture of filamentous algae. The living (and dying) installation takes on a discordant tone to the boom and bust of markets and bodies, positioning the processes of decay, movement, flux, and renewal as foundational to illness mediation and cultural remediation.
The work pairs those cellular structures which have been first in the artist’s experience to register autoimmune symptoms, with various agal bodies local to our environment. Each glass ‘molecular becoming’ carries a name – a knowledge – that emerge from within that cellular body’s innate characteristics, “the rhizomorph (breast tissue)” and “the traveller (volvox ferrisii),” for example. Together, the eight glassworks imply a human-algal hybrid with a unique set of erotic wisdom.
The artist extends deep gratitude and admiration for her algal advisor and collaborator, Sarah Choukah, Ph.D. in communications and faculty at L'Université de l'Ontario français.
Bloom (2021) Living pond installation: Stained glass, filamentous algae collected from (and later returned to) a pond near the gallery; vinyl pond lining; silicone caulk; painted lumber; copper pipe and fittings; solder, UV lights, bubbler, lake water. 80 x 36 x 46 1/2 inches.
Stained glass ‘molecular becomings’ in ascending order:
the feeler (viscera); the animist (ovary); a passageway (fallopian tube); the weaver (filamentous chlorophyta); the rhizomorph (breast tissue); the communicant (scenedesmus); erotic compass (neuroimmune mastocyte); and the traveller (volvox ferrisii).
Following the exhibition at the Plumb, Bloom - a site-specific installation - was disassembled, returning the filamentous algae to the nearby body of water where they originated from. All eight stained glass elements from the original work live on as indivual wall-based sculptures called Bloom Installation Artifacts. Five were shown at Art Toronto 2021with The Plumb, and two at NADA (NY) in 2023.
Bloom Installation Artifacts (2021). Below, from left to right : the communicant (scenedesmus) ; the rhizomorph (breast tissue) ; the animist (ovary) ; the weaver (filamentous chlorophyta) ; & a passageway (fallopian tube). Images by Alison Postma and courtesy of The Plumb.