SWARM

Gallery 1C03 is pleased to host SWARM, an online exhibition program of the SWARM artist collective. In addition to a film screening and public discussion, SWARM includes the launch of the arc.hive, a virtual sympoetic space that holds the work of 8 artist-researchers. Through beading technologies, digital worlding, embroidery, sculpture, storytelling, poetics, sound, and performance works, artists Dallas Cant, Roewan Crowe, Lorena Sekwan Fontaine, Franchesca Hebert-Spence, Kaliesa Beasse McGillvray, Hailey Primrose, Willow Rector, and Maram Rocha, present work developed in a context of sympoiesis, or, making-with. This research-creation project, partially funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, is based out of the greenhouse artlab at The University of Winnipeg.

Much like the honeybee swarms that inspired the collective’s name, SWARM considers how making and thinking practices attuned to process might function as practical strategies for becoming better humans in the Chthulucene. In particular, SWARM grapples with a turning toward – to one another, relationality and to pollinators and plants themselves – as a way of holding and caring for ecological pasts, presents, and futures in entangled relationality. In doing so, we ask what might we learn from pollinators? What might they teach us in crafting methods of ongoingness in this time of climate trouble?

Facing a global pandemic has certainly forced a shift in the collective’s working and being together, yet it has not drawn us away from our intentions: finding ways to stay with and make meaning out of the crises and devastation brought about by capitalism, colonialism, and the intertwined doctrines of oppression which uphold them. While we may not be able to gather as closely as some pollinators do, we now forge solitary pods of thinking and artmaking – turning inward then reaching out. In this way, we continue being-with the pollinators, and in a small way we feel closer to them.

SWARM is curated by Dallas Cant and Roewan Crowe, in collaboration with Jennifer Gibson at Gallery 1C03.

Visit the Exhibition

The exhibition can be viewed online at https://swarm.greenhouseartlab.com/ beginning March 3, 2022 to April 9, 2022.

Online Program Schedule

Conversation with SWARM artists
March 10, 7:00 – 8:30 pm CT

Honeyland Film Screening
March 11 – 18, 2022
Presented in partnership with the Winnipeg Film Group.
Watch Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov’s powerful 2019 film Honeyland online for free.