Living with Concepts is a temporary exhibition on UTM campus presented by the Blackwood. Over a three-year period, installations by contemporary artists animate the campus and respond to its unique ecological context, engage the university community and its many visitors, and activate open spaces to foster educational encounters across disciplines.
With three artworks installed across ten sites, Living with Concepts creates multisensory experiences of campus environments: Dylan Miner’s works using salvaged old-growth lumber and copper evoke Indigenous past, present, and future; Jana Winderen’s four-channel audio composition connects the soundscape of vulnerable marine ecologies in the Barents Sea with the UTM forest; and Tania Willard channels the agency of the wind through poems generated from live weather data, reflecting on Indigenous storytelling, water protection, and resilience.
Living with Concepts presents outdoor artworks in a durational format, responsive to seasonal change and ecological cycles. Miner’s works are subject to wear and oxidation, designed to rematriate to their origins in the environment; playback on Winderen’s Spring Bloom […] changes seasonally in response to migration and breeding patterns in the forest; and Willard’s windsocks are continuously animated by the wind—which also generates daily poems from local weather data. Living with Concepts fosters conditions to live and dwell with artworks over time, and in dialogue with their environments.
These artworks were first presented offsite at Southdown Industrial Area, Mississauga, for the Blackwood’s 2018 program The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea.
Campus Map
Living with Concepts takes place across ten sites on UTM campus. See the map below for details, or download a printable map for a self-directed tour.
The screen visualizing poetry from Liberation of the Chinook Wind (site 2B) is indoors.
1A–G Dylan Miner, Agamiing – Niwaabaandaan miinawaa Nimikwendaan // At the Lake – I see and I remember
2A–B Tania Willard, Liberation of the Chinook Wind
3 Jana Winderen, Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone: From the Barents Sea to Lake Ontario
X Blackwood Gallery
Y e|gallery
Z1–4 Blackwood lightboxes
Spring Bloom Playback
The audio installation Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone: From the Barents Sea to Lake Ontario is periodically shut off in response to seasonal ecological activity, determined in consultation with faculty in the Department of Biology.
Micropublication
A free micropublication to accompany Living with Concepts features essays by Danielle Boissoneau, Ella Finer, and Nicole Latulippe which expand on the contexts, themes, and sites that animate each of the artworks included in the program.
Launched in October 2022, free print copies of Living with Concepts are available for pickup on UTM campus at the Blackwood's publication stand near the entrance to the Hazel McCallion Academic Learning Centre and Library. Contact the Blackwood to request print copies, and see the publication page for additional details.
Living with Concepts
Dylan Miner, Tania Willard, Jana Winderen
Curated by Christine Shaw
Artist Projects
Installation Views
Interpretive Video: Agamiing
Mkomose (Andrew Judge) discusses Dylan Miner's Agamiing – Niwaabaandaan miinawaa Nimikwendaan // At the Lake – I see and I remember for Living with Concepts.
Interpretive Video: Liberation of the Chinook Wind
Tania Willard discusses Liberation of the Chinook Wind as installed on UTM campus for Living with Concepts.
Interpretive Video: Spring Bloom
Jana Winderen discusses Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone: From the Barents Sea to Lake Ontario for Living with Concepts.
- Curator
- Christine Shaw
Shaw’s work convenes, enables, and amplifies the transdisciplinary thinking necessary for understanding our current multi-scalar historical moment and co-creating the literacies, skills, and sensibilities required to adapt to the various socio-technical transformations of our contemporary society. She has applied her commitment to compositional strategies, epistemic disobedience, and social ecologies to multi-year curatorial projects including Take Care (2016–2019), an exhibition-led inquiry into care, exploring its heterogeneous and contested meanings, practices, and sites, as well as the political, economic, and technological forces currently shaping care; The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea (2015–2023), a variegated series of curatorial and editorial instantiations of the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force exploring the relentless legacies of colonialism and capital excess that undergird contemporary politics of sustainability and climate justice; and OPERA-19: An Assembly Sustaining Dreams of the Otherwise (2021–2029), a decentralized polyvocal drama in four acts taking up asymmetrical planetary crisis, differential citizenship, affective planetary attention disorder, and a strategic composition of worlds. She is the founding editor of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Blackwood, 2018–ongoing), and co-editor of The Work of Wind: Land (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2018) and The Work of Wind: Sea (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2023).
Stephen Surlin
Liberation of the Chinook Wind is sponsored by Panasonic.
Artwork storage and transportation sponsored by Musket Transport.
The Blackwood
University of Toronto Mississauga
3359 Mississauga Road
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
[email protected]
(905) 828-3789
The galleries are currently open. Hours of operation: Monday–Saturday, 12–5pm, Wednesdays until 8pm.
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The Blackwood is situated on the Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Seneca, and Huron-Wendat.