Installation view of In honoured dust by Megan Feniak. Courtesy of the artist. Photos by Blaine Campbell.
MEGAN FENIAK
In honoured dust | Library Gallery
14 OCTOBER 2023 - 13 JANUARY 2024
In honoured dust assembles Megan Feniak’s recent sculptures of caterpillars, Glacier Lilies, and Cyclocosmia that consider a shared connection between consciousness and the earth. Through the approach of a craftsperson, Feniak depicts these caterpillars, lilies, and trapdoor spiders in laboriously hand-rendered materials of carved wood, cast aluminum, and bronze. Feniak’s detailed depictions of these creatures of the earth both disgust and attract. The negative subconscious stimulation from insects and other ground-dwellers is thought to come from their association with filth, decomposition, and mortality. Considering Feniak’s sculptures, this psychic impulse is a bridge to remembering our connection with the ground and the transformations possible within it.
Feniak describes a time while camping when, while lying on the ground, she was at the mercy of a swarm of hundreds of Spongy Moth caterpillars. Subsumed in a flood of the insects, it was as if they thought her to be no different than the rest of the landscape, seemingly unaware of her presence. Based on this experience, Feniak has cast an organically shaped swarm of Spongy Moth caterpillars that envelop an unseen organic shape. Alongside the caterpillars are aluminum casts of the delicate Glacier Lily of the Rocky Mountains. The wildflowers gaze back towards the harsh ground they sprung from, spectral in their brief time on the landscape.
On the wall of the library hangs a ribbed, hand-carved disc with ridges that make it appear as a vague face or a mask. The shape of the carving is derived from the abdomen of the Cyclocosmia, a type of trapdoor spider that uses its uniquely disc-shaped abdomen to plug the opening of its burrow. Its body simultaneously becomes a barrier between above and below and to its unsuspecting prey, just another surface of the earth. Feniak intricately carves the abdomen’s muscles, spines, and grooves with each mark of the chisel. The wood is then dyed with milk paint and earth pigments, an ancient method of using soil to colour the work. In honoured dust is an opportunity to re-attune to the sensations and transformations possible in the subterranean.
Curated by Adam Whitford, Associate Curator & Exhibitions Manager
Megan Feniak (b. 1990) is a sculpture-based artist and craftsperson living and working in Alberta. Her sculptures explore themes of transformation, longing, mortality and religious ecstasy. The works draw from a range of references including Christian mysticism, science fiction, the American Shakers, and Slavic paganism. Mutating and drifting in and out of figuration, her sculptures often feature human and non-human bodies and their negative impressions. Approaching the deep wells of the heart with lyricism, her sculptures intimate the power of affects, gestures, and the positioning of the body in ritual and belief. Feniak received her BFA from the Alberta University of the Arts in 2018, and her MFA from the University of Guelph in 2021.
SAAG Library Gallery The Gallery presents exhibitions as in-situ interventions within our Library. The Library Gallery features a diverse selection of artworks and mediums from regional contemporary artists. Artists are invited to think of the library as a unique exhibition context by investigating the Gallery’s programming around readership, publications, and its place within Lethbridge’s historic Carnegie library which opened in 1922. Artists are encouraged to consider the physical architecture of the library and its material holdings, responding to a broader and generative idea of what a library might be, as they change and adapt to new forms of knowledge production.
We acknowledge the support of the City of Lethbridge, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.