OCAD University’s Faculty of Art is hosting a group exhibition focusing on climate justice, opening October 21, and culminating in a panel titled “Creative action during climate crisis,” on November 1. The submission-based exhibition, co-curated by Michelle Beck and Dana Snow, focuses on the idea of a multispecies interconnectivity that makes every organism necessary to one another in their surrounding environs. Messmates are companions – in Latin “cum panis” – who share bread and rely on each other for survival. 

The exhibition serves as an entry point to thinking about how we engage with the land and the land’s resources: How do we make room for a relationship with land other than one of ownership? How do we navigate our own complicity in colonial and capitalist environmental destruction? What does it mean to push through collective grief for the land and to strategize?

Messmates is not an end point, but a call to action. The exhibition encourages the audience to ask each other to do more: to advocate for changes in policy; to use our bodies and our art to protest; to listen and learn from one another; and to value collaboration, interconnection and care in a radical sense.

Featured artists include:

Annie Chen, Athena Katerina, Beehive Collective, Chief Lady Bird, Brandon Prince, Carolina Uscategui, Chelsea Smith, Ghazal Vakilzadeh, Gina D'Aloisio, Huaijun Wen, Patrick Stochmal, Sandra Dammizio, Sean Sandusky, Skylar Cheung, Tamar Bresge, Zishou Li

Exhibition dates:

October 21 to November 1, 2019

Ada Slaight Gallery, OCAD University

100 McCaul St.

Closing Reception: November 1, 2019, 5:30 to 7 p.m.

Panel: Creative Action during Climate Crisis  - November 1, 2019   

Moderated by Joce Two Crows Tremblay

OCAD University

100 McCaul St.

Room 190, Auditorium

Panelists:

Maya Menezes (The Leap and Noone is Illegal)

Andrea Bastien (Indigenous Climate Action)

Daniel Sarah Karasik (Artists for Climate & Migrant Justice and Indigenous Sovereignty)

5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. − Messmates artist talk and reception
7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. − Creative Action during Climate Crisis panel
8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. − Panel reception

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Acknowledgments:

Thank you to OCAD U’s Office of the President, Alumni Relations and Faculty of Art for their support. Thank you to Ryerson Unifor Chair, Social Justice and Democracy and Ryerson Student Union.

Coordination by b.h. Yael and Victoria Ho