Mice on Venus
Exhibition view of Mice on Venus
Leona Bergeron, Catherine Ellis, Minghui Mai, Khush Sagar, Keira Sainsbury, Sarah Silva, Hannah White, Lynette Zhang
Main Space
December 1–9, 2023
Union Gallery partners with Queen’s University Professor Ella Dawn McGeough to present Mice on Venus, a pop-up exhibition by third-year sculpture and time-based media students. Inspired by the potential signs of life on Venus, a notoriously hostile planet, the class responds to challenges to the fine art program with an attitude of hopeful action in the face of improbable odds. Their three collaborative projects are an artful answer to shortages and inequities felt across campus, offering much-needed connection and levity.
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
King-David Olajuwon, brotherHOOD | Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Blanketed by highly reflective clouds that make it the brightest of our solar system’s planets, Venus has inspired scientists, artists, and poets across space and time.
For all its tantalizing brilliance, consider the inhospitality of its conditions: roasting temperatures of hundreds of degrees and vaporous gasses containing droplets of corrosive sulfuric acid. An environment unlikely to harbour life as we know it. And yet, remarkably, recent evidence by way of phosphine (a gas associated with living organisms) suggests that microorganisms may exist swirling within the planet’s atmosphere.
It is well known that the fine arts program at Queen’s is contending with certain challenges. A pause on admissions, a shrunken student body, and a recent reintegration within the art history and art conservation department. And yet, as we imagine life might possibly, improbably exist on Venus, art persists—similarly ephemeral, seemingly undercover, unmoored from the foundations of past or future, in what can easily be understood as a difficult environment. Within this context, Mice on Venus brings together eight third-year sculpture and time-based-media students through three collaborative projects. By extending Union Gallery’s physical framework, each work leans into elaboration, humour, and relationality to address what the students have determined as campus-wide needs and discrepancies: joy, colour, energy, fun!
Ella Dawn McGeough, Adjunct Professor of Sculpture and Time-Based-Media