Kali Yuga

In Hindu mythology, the Kali Yuga is the age of darkness, signaling the destruction of the world and the eventual rise of a new cycle of creation. It is the artist's hope that both the sorrows and the wonders of living in these times will be reflected in the exhibition, where we may pause to consider and reconsider the traces we leave upon the world around us. This work speaks to the unintended consequences of our passage, as a species, around the world, and all the tiny apocalypses we leave behind.

The Kali Yuga series is a meditation on themes of disappearance, collapse, and hope amid the ruins. These works in the series draw upon current affairs, art history, and ancient and modern mythologies to speak the role of beauty in the face of overwhelming loss.

Kali Yuga I : Footsteps / Traces des pas

Kali Yuga I : Footsteps (Traces des pas) was originally created for the 10e Biennale national de sculpture contemporaine, 2022, but was always intended to be the first (albeit largest) in a series. A meditation on the unintended consequences of our passage across the globe as a species, the central chimera is part human, part muskie (an enormous fish native to the Great Lakes), and sprouting vegetation and a medusa of invasive sea lampreys. The part-native-part-invasive chimera trails muddy toxic footsteps encrusted with quagga mussels and purple loosestrife.

2022

Wool, reed, silk, silicone, recycled textiles, faux flora, found objects, waste materials from the AGSM, soil, gravel.

Photo credit Doug Derksen

Installation view at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba

Kali Yuga I : Footsteps / Traces des pas – detail view

Kali Yuga I : Footsteps (Traces des pas)

Wool, reed, silk, silicone, recycled textiles, faux flora, found objects, waste materials from the AGSM, soil, gravel.

Installation dimensions variable.

Photo credit Doug Derksen

Installation view at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba

Kali Yuga II : I'll Remember You

Kali Yuga II : I’ll Remember You is based upon the web comic by xkcd, Randall Munroe, as reproduced in Donna Haraway’s “Staying with the Trouble”, as reproduced in pencil by me as a torn page of the book, and also as a sculpture made of wool, resin, and recycled faux flower parts. The comic tells the story of Orphis apifera, a species of bee orchid whose symbiotic bee has gone extinct, rendering the orchid’s future uncertain at best. This work is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of something beautiful and wondrous but now gone. But we will remember your bee, orchid, and we will remember you.

Photo: Doug Derksen

Installation view at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba

Kali Yuga IV : I'll Remember You

2023

Wool, resin, epoxy, found faux floral elements, wasp’s nest, frame, and graphite on paper.

Photo: Doug Derksen

Installation view at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba

Kali Yuga III : Through a Glass Darkly

Kali Yuga III : Through A Glass Darkly – the inspiration for this diptych was a 99% Invisible podcast that my brother Max sent me. In it, host Roman Mars discusses the origin of the Jackalope mythology. The theory is that the origin of the “legend” could have been sightings of rabbits infected with Shope papilloma - a virus that causes monstrous keratinous growths to sprout from the heads and faces of the afflicted bunnies. That the idea of a “rabbit with horns” translated into the comical jackrabbit-with-deer-antlers isn’t a long walk from there. Here the mythology and the probable real life origin face off across a divide - one paw up as if to touch their reflection in the mirror, or to reach across an expanse.

Photo: Doug Derksen

Installation view at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba

Kali Yuga III : Through a Glass Darkly – detail view

Kali Yuga III : Through a Glass Darkly, Jackalope

2023

Wool, reed, hog gut, resin, epoxy, velvet, wood

Photo: Doug Derksen

Installation view at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba

Kali Yuga III : Through a Glass Darkly – detail view

Kali Yuga III : Through a Glass Darkly, Shope Papilloma

2023

Wool, reed, hog gut, resin, epoxy, velvet, wood

Photo: Doug Derksen

Installation view at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba

Kali Yuga III : Through a Glass Darkly – detail view

Kali Yuga III : Through a Glass Darkly, Shope papilloma

2023

Wool, reed, hog gut, resin, epoxy, velvet, wood

Photo: Doug Derksen

Installation view at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba

Kali Yuga IV : Out from the Deep

Kali Yuga IV : Out From the Deep was inspired by another news item shared with me by family members - this time my mother, neurobiologist Lily Jan - who started sending me articles about these deep sea anglerfish, called Pacific Football fish, they have begun erratically washing up on Southern Californian shores. No one knows why but as these fish live at 2000+ feet, it’s ominous that they’re washing up on beaches. In trying to grapple with all the glaring and overwhelming signs of collapse all around us, I found I had to grab on to the smaller, subtler, more uncanny and unsettling details to try to capture this age of deep unease we’re living in. The metaphor that comes to mind is trying to perceive the sun - you would go blind staring right at it so we look through an intermediary like a pinhole camera to try to see what is too bright to look at directly.

Photo credits: Doug Derksen

Installation view at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba

Kali Yuga IV: Out from the Deep – detail view

Kali Yuga IV : Out From the Deep

2023

Wool, resin, silicone, sand

Photo credits: Doug Derksen

Installation view at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba

Kali Yuga IV : Out from the Deep

Kali Yuga IV : Out From the Deep

2023

Wool, resin, silicone, sand

Photo credits: Doug Derksen

Installation view at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba

Kali Yuga IV seen through the reeds of Kali Yuga I

Installation view, Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba

Photo credit: Doug Derksen

Kali Yuga I : Footsteps / Traces des pas

Installation view, Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba

Photo credit: Doug Derksen

Kali Yuga VI : Melt

Kali Yuga VI : Melt was the last completed piece of the Kali Yuga cycle….for now. An unfired ceramic polar bear skull that I sculpted days before the opening rests on an old fur rug (not actually made of polar bear, but reminiscent) nestled amongst a few tufts of artificially coloured lichen. I had brought the wishing stone on a whim, and it decided it wanted to be a part of this piece. Wishing stones, in Newfoundland lore, are the beach pebbles with a clear line through them. This one was a full ring, which also reminds me of the tze beads in Tibetan culture that carry power. With the wishing stones, you’re supposed to throw them back in the ocean and make your wish. This stone I picked up on a beach in Newfoundland last summer, shortly before I found out a beloved friend had died by suicide. It didn’t go back in the ocean, it rode home to the prairies with me on a plane. I suppose it represents the those things that are futile to wish for, the losses that cannot be fixed by wishing. Death by suicide or death by warming, neither can be taken back.

Photo: Doug Derksen

Installation view at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba

Kali Yuga VI : Melt

2023

Unfired ceramic, lichen, found fur, wishing stone

Photo: Doug Derksen

Installation view at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba

The Cyphers

This series was conceived to be created during a 10 day micro-residency at the AGSM. They agreed to let me loose in their huge and beautiful ceramics studio, under the watchful eye of head technician and master ceramicist Kevin Conlin. The concept was to add a layer of meaning and interpretation to the Kali Yuga series - a set of symbols of circularity, rebirth, and hope in darkness. For as long as the Yugas are or as destructive as the Kali Yuga is, they are, unlike the Western conception of apocalypse, cyclical.

Photo: Doug Derksen

Installation view at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba

Cypher I : Ouroboros

Cypher I : Ouroboros – based on internet images of real pet snakes that have somehow confused their own tails for something edible and in many cases died by literally consuming themselves.

2023

Stoneware, iron stain and glaze.

Photo: Doug Derksen

Installation view at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba

Cypher II : Spallanzani's Egg

Cypher II: Spallanzani’s Egg – the egg, another symbol of rebirth/regeneration, here represented by one of the handful of Great Auk eggs held in the British Museum of Natural History’s ornithology collection at Tring. The egg was collected in the mid 1800’s, while the last auk closed it’s eyes sometime in the late 1880’s. I’m continuously fascinated by the paradox of killing something to preserve it as it is disappearing from the planet.

2023

Stoneware, copper, iron and glaze.

Photo: Doug Derksen

Installation view at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba

Cypher III : Scarab

Cypher III : Scarab – represented by the atlas beetle, the scarab as natural history specimen as opposed to the more recognizable Egyptian carved stones. Atlas carried the weight of the world on his back.

2023

Stoneware, cobalt stain, glaze, found wood panel.

Photo: Doug Derksen

Installation view at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba

Cypher IV : Pandora's Box

CYPHER IV : Pandora’s Box – the word that is commonly translated as “box” is actually the Greek pithos, which is more like a lidded storage jar. After Pandora was gifted it by Zeus, forbidden to open it, and then opened it and unleashed sorrow pain and horror into the world, hope remained trapped under the lid, so that is what we work with as humans in this existence.

2023

Hand-coiled stoneware, iron stain.

Photo: Doug Derksen

Installation view at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba