L’ART S’AFFICHE x Technopôle Angus
Jessica Houston
Horizon Felt
This new L’art s’affiche exhibition showcases artist Jessica Houston‘s series of photographs exploring climate change, deep time, and geographies of resistance in the polar regions. Discover it on the fence surrounding the Place Michel Hébert construction site, at the corner of Molson and William-Tremblay streets.
L’art s’affiche is a public display project, with the objective of making contemporary art accessible while visually energizing the urban space. Emerging and established artists, from multiple practices, are selected and invited to exhibit their works in an unexpected environment.
Jessica Houston
Biography
Jessica Houston lives and works in Montréal. Her works are held in the collections of the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, the National Museum of Fine Arts of Québec, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ), the Canada Council Art Bank, as well as in public and private collections in Canada and abroad. She has exhibited in Canada, Europe, the United States, Iceland, and Finland, and has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts, National Geographic, and Parks Canada. She is represented by Art Mûr Gallery in Montréal.
Artist statement
Jessica Houston’s photographs explore climate change, deep time, and geographies of resistance in the polar regions. Since 2008, she has collaborated with communities, scientists, philosophers, and poets across the Arctic and Antarctica, creating works that foreground ecosystems of colour and light.
In her Horizon Felt series, Houston placed coloured felt in front of her lens to create new cartographies of the poles. Her photographs of abandoned outposts, scientific stations, and retreating glaciers reveal the histories of colonialism, capitalism, and environmental injustice, while opening space to rethink the “natural.”
Colours drawn from seaweed, moss, ships, gravestones, and flags disrupt the notion of uninhabited white landscapes. They emphasize the entanglement of human and more-than-human worlds and invite us to imagine the poles as living systems of which we are part.
