What does end-of-life look like for our once-precious but quickly abandoned electronic companions? Where do our phones, computers, tablets, satellites and hard-drives go when we part with them? What happens to them when they enter the waste stream? What if they were given an opportunity to sprout, spawn, and spread?
As a person who collects unwanted technologies through misguided empathy justified with the practice of artmaking, I continually ask myself and others these questions. These tangible objects once enabled our access to the intangible expanse of the Internet, connectivity to friends and family, and provided a gateway to the data that comprises our memories, observations and research. Are these moments, connections, and memories still somehow stored inside the wires and circuits that comprise our devices? How do these unseeable and unknowable histories contribute meaning to the materials that are left behind? How can the significance of their service be recognized and remembered through the process of art making? What potential does electronic waste hold as a material for artistic production?
Explore all of these topics and more with Twyla Exner. You can register at Eventbrite here!
This Alternator Chat is part of Weaving Together: Sustainability, a partner project between the Cool Arts Society, Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, Kelowna Art Gallery, and Ponderosa Fibre Arts Guild in Kelowna, BC.
This is the second annual Weaving Together series, which brings to the forefront sustainable fibre art practices. Engaging the community to demonstrate accountability to the environment, show a coming-together through a variety of activities: online chats, essays, videos, in person workshops, and hands on community weaving opportunities. For more information on Weaving Together, visit Cool Arts Society.
Twyla Exner is a Canadian artist inspired by the wonders of nature and the idea of electronic technologies gone awry. She uses the materials and imagery of discarded electronic technologies as a departure towards wonderous and worrisome installations, sculptures and drawings that propose hybrids of technological structures and living organisms. Twyla currently resides as a visitor on the unceded traditional territory of the Lheidli T'enneh in the forest of north-central British Columbia.
Twyla holds a BFA from the University of Regina (Regina, SK) and a MFA from Concordia University (Montreal, QC). She is a part-time faculty member at Sheridan College (Oakville, ON) and Emily Carr University (Vancouver, BC). She has held artist residencies with Herschel Supply Co. Gastown (Vancouver, BC) and Omineca Arts Center (Prince George, BC). She is the recipient of numerous grants from Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, Alberta Foundation for the Arts and Saskatchewan Arts. Her works have been exhibited in Canada and the USA including at the Appalachian Center for Craft (Tennessee, USA), Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina, SK), Art Mûr (Montreal, QC), and VIVO (Vancouver, BC). Twyla’s artworks are in numerous public collections including the Royal BC Museum (Victoria, BC), Saskatchewan Arts (Regina, SK) and the Kamloops Art Gallery (Kamloops, BC).
This Alternator Chat will be recorded and archived on our website.
