GARDEN CIRCLE CINEMA

Sharing messages, images, podcasts, videos, readings, and synchronous discussions, Garden Circle Cinema is a conversation between Maggie Groat, Jessica Groome and Tiziana La Melia. For the three of us, who met while attending the graduate program at the University of Guelph, our project is an attempt to reconnect during an exceptional season of gardening, care, listening, looking and learning, via Niagara, Berlin and Vancouver. This spring, as life shifted, as work moved to the home, as travel plans to see one another were postponed, we found ourselves deeply rooted to the places we live - and we returned to work outside, gathering consciously, psychically and virtually together. Our dialogue is further contextualized by this unprecedented time during a global pandemic that provokes radical reassessment, and the opportunity to re-envision and re-prioritize what was carelessly considered normal.  The temperature of the planet and the body are scrutinized daily. An altered sense of time allows for the attention of inner worlds to be recalibrated. The uncertainty of the season is one whose pattern of site, plot or almanac is revolutionary and tending to roots. This exchange considers the integral roles of gardens in our lives, of how these spaces are informed by personal experiences, perspectives, and locational identities, how they inform or become part of our artistic practices, while at the same time interrogating the social-political implications of plants, land stewardship, power-relations and access to greenspace. Our contribution to to feel close provides a glimpse into this continued research and dialogue.

Maggie Groat is an artist who lives with her partner and three children in onguiaahra, the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, Chonnonton, and Anishnaabeg. Her work strategically mobilizes a range of media including works on paper, sculpture, textiles, site-specific interventions and publications to interrogate methodologies of collage and salvage practices. Her current research surrounds site-responsiveness, shifting territories, decolonial ways-of-being, gardens, slowness, margins, utility and beauty, the transformative potentials of found and ritual materials, Indigenous Futurism, power images, the double, and the influences of the astronomical on the terrestrial. Her practice is informed by her Skarú:ręʔ and Settler backgrounds, her role as a mother, and the environmental impacts of the Anthropocene. Groat is currently working on MOTHER COLOUR which considers engagements and possibilities between domestic spaces, the otherworldly and other--than-human, including compiled writings, materials and research related to caregiving and becoming, utility and beauty, and the long shadow of modernism in relation to feminist and Indigenous revisionist histories. 

Jessica Groome is a visual artist based in Berlin, Germany. She was born in Vancouver and grew up on the Thompson river, across from Walhachin, BC on the unceded territory of the Secwepemc (Shuswap) Nation. Her recent work is collaborative in nature, hosting artists at her garden La Datcha and maintaining her alter-ego CIRCLES & WIGS with Ashleigh Bartlett. Since the beginning of 2020, Groome has been reflecting upon summers past, navigating topics of friendship, nostalgia, dedication and distance. Thinking about Paul Klee’s painting Wachstum der Nachtpflanzen (Growth of the Night Plants), Groome is currently making propositional works for Ella Dawn McGeough based on her work She changes everything She touches and everything She touches changes.

Tiziana La Melia was born in Palermo (IT), raised on an orchard-garden situated on unceded Syilx (Okanangan) territory and currently lives on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ/selilwitulh (Tsleil- Waututh) Nations (Vancouver).  Her transdisciplinary and nonbinary practice aims for holistic interplay with matter, environment, ecology, memory, storytelling, place and language transformed into poetry, painting, video, drawing, collaboration and installation. The work includes acts of staining, dabbing, encapsulating, digging, burrowing, pruning, dusting, sweeping, spilling, planting, forecasting, knotting, burning, soaking, caring, waiting, grafting, scratching, rotting, loving, and letting go. Over the past year she has been preparing a new work titled The Simple Life: Country Mouse, City Mouse - mixing personal chronicles, aesop fable and reality television. Global Cows 2020 is a collaborative online exhibition currently on view at https://www.conceptualfinearts.com/cfa/2020/05/05/global-cows-2020/

Curated by Tarin Dehod.