Dig a Hole in the Garden at Oxygen Art Centre in Nelson

Taking its name from Yoko Ono’s CLOUD PIECE (1963), dig a hole in the garden is an exhibition at Oxygen Art Centre in Nelson that explores plant collection as a material and cultural practice, with an interest in plant uses for pleasure, community resilience, and healing. The exhibition features works by artists Shannon Garden-Smith (Tkaronto/Toronto), and T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss (Skwxwu7mesh/ Sto:Lo/ Hawaiian/ Swiss), as well as a temporary library presented both online and in person that will be linked with an online reading group. The exhibition features Garden-Smith’s pigment-stained gelatin lamp shades, “In a hare’s form” (2021), and a new site-specific gelatin installation that will shift throughout the exhibition’s duration.

Through a form of alchemy, Garden-Smith transforms plant materials from detritus to sculptural blossoms. Theresa Wang describes the decorative light fixtures as suspending “various dried and pressed flora collected on the artist’s walks over the seasons, bringing (once) living things into the living milieu.  In this way, these works consider ornamentation as not only a way to confound the passage of time, but also as a record of the durational and interspatial acts of foraging, gathering, and conserving” (2022).