The Air of the Now and Gone
Carleton University Art Gallery, January 26 – May 4, 2025
Curated by Kirsty Robertson and Sarah E.K. Smith
Featuring artists Maude Arès, Christina Battle, Erin Johnson, Colin Lyons, Caroline Monnet, Cynthia Girard-Renard, Niloufar Salimi and Hanae Utamura. Featuring guest writers Siobhan Angus, Elaina Foley and Kristi Leora Gansworth.
Crisis, catastrophe and disaster abound in contemporary discussions of climate change and its impacts. In fact, such sentiments are so pervasive that they might have tipped into what author Cal Flyn describes as a “yearning for the apocalypse.”
The slide into apathy and despair at the extent of the damage seems inevitable, with the only retort being empty calls to hope.
Are there alternatives? The Air of the Now and Gone explores relationships to the environment, seeking to engage other affective registers, including humour, care, love, gratitude, wonder and cooperation. This exhibition resists optimism and naiveté, moving beyond hope to engender radical engagement.
Bringing together new and recent works produced by artists working in video, installation, painting and photography, The Air of the Now and Gone aims to counter apathy and complicate optimism about the future.
The selected works ask visitors to refuse to look away from the wicked problem of climate change while engaging a spectrum of resonant and unexpected emotional responses.
The Air of the Now and Gone Publication
Published by CUAG, 36 pages, 2025.
With essays by Kirsty Robertson and Sarah E.K. Smith, Siobhan Angus and Elaina Foley, and Kristi Leora Gansworth
In the PDF publication accompanying The Air of the Now and Gone, curators Kirsty Robertson and Sarah E.K. Smith ask: in the face of the “wicked problem” of climate change, which precludes easy solutions, how can we move forward? How can we address a crisis that prompts apathy and disconnect?
In their introductory essay, Robertson and Smith discuss the works of the artists, who refuse detachment and simultaneously complicate idealism. Like the artists, the curators seek to encourage diverse responses to the realities of climate change, moving beyond apathy and despair to engage empathy, wonder, joy, attentiveness and connection.
In their text, Siobhan Angus and Elaina Foley offer a meditation on air and breathing amidst multiple connected climate crises. Kristi Leora Gansworth foregrounds Anishinaabe onáchigewin (prophetic teachings) and inákonigéwin (a concept that denotes action and consequence) in her essay. These she shares as strategies for developing worldviews in line with the Earth’s spark.
This publication is funded by CUAG, Canada Research Chairs Program, Centre for Sustainable Curating, Diana Nemiroff Publishing Endowment Fund and Western University’s Special Project Fund.
Download the publication (362 KB pdf opens in new tab).
Exhibition documentation by Justin Wonnacott, courtesy of Carleton University Art Gallery:
