WE ARE WEATHER

We Are Weather was a solo-exhibition at the Art Gallery of Guelph about changing human relationships with weather. It brought together: Weather Watcher (2016), Watching, Dull Edges (the northern hemisphere of a 23°27′ tilt) (2017), Watching, White Ibis (2016-2019) and Everything We Have Done is Weather Now (2019), along with artist selections of works from the gallery’s permanent collection, chosen for their depictions of weather.

From the Art Gallery of Guelph:

Studying the forces that shape and transform human relationships with the environment, Lisa Hirmer’s work spans visual art, social practice, and writing. In We Are Weather, she explores how we recognize and represent environmental change at a moment when the Holocene, a geological era of climate stability, gives way to a new epoch, the Anthropocene, in which humans act as a planet-scale force. While we are aware of changing conditions – from mass extinctions to climate change – the unprecedented scale of these changes and their cascading impacts can be difficult to make sense of in the context of daily life. Juxtaposing the outcomes of Hirmer’s creative research with works she has selected from the Art Gallery of Guelph’s permanent collection, this exhibition examines how we move from simply observing to registering these losses and understanding their accumulating effects.

A text about this exhibition by Elwood Jimmy is available here