September 6–December 1, 2018
Presented in conjunction with The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea.
Click here to download the micropublication featuring commissioned essays by Natasha Chaykowski and Macarena Gómez-Barris, exhibition infromation, biographies, and full colour illustrations throughout.
Examining nature symbolism, territorial resistance, and solidarity economies connected to land and water, Calgary-based Miruna Dragan’s When Either But Not Both Are True traces the contours of embodiment and the agency of more-than-human worlds. The exhibition explores the limits of human comprehension alongside material manifestations of the unknown, the underground, and the under-worldly. Exploring dreaming, divination, energy economies, and logic systems, the project engages human relationships with the natural world in order to question our interactions with the physical spaces we inhabit.
Miruna Dragan (1975, Bucharest, Romania) is based in Calgary. With an intuitive approach, Dragan responds to observed synchronicities through a broad range of methods and materials, toward a subjective reimagining of archetypal myths and landscapes. Reflecting themes of dispersion and transcendence, both as individual pieces and collectively within immersive environments, her works offer themselves as tools for mystical experience. Recent exhibition venues include Museo de la Ciudad in Queretaro Mexico (2012 & 2019), the Esker Foundation in Calgary (2013), the Alberta Biennial (2013), G Gallery in Toronto (2014), Nanaimo Art Gallery (2015), Southern Alberta Art Gallery (2016/17), Nickle Galleries at University of Calgary (2017), Division Gal-lery in Toronto (2017), and The New Gallery in Calgary (2017).
The Blackwood Gallery gratefully acknowledges the operating support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the University of Toronto Mississauga.
This exhibition is presented in conjunction with The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea, a year-long project series that aims to foster a deeper public awareness of the complex entanglements of ecologies of excess, environmental legacies of colonialism, the financialization of nature, contemporary catastrophism, politics of sustainability, climate justice, and resilience. It sets out to develop durable visual-cultural literacies and invites publics to create new encounters in the common struggle for a future.
