Chased around by the ghosts of a paved-over salt marsh and equipped with perverted botanists’ tools, voices of divination and herbal elixirs, we will explore the neighborhood of Gowanus on foot and onscreen. Meet at ISSUE Project Room, from which Gina Badger will lead a field botany tour exploring the place of edible and medicinal weeds in ecologies of decolonization.
Badger's work for The Sonic Unconscious will conclude with a free reception and screening of a video that builds around an interview with herbalist and social justice activist Dori Midnight.
Gina Badger is an artist and writer working between Toronto, Montreal, and various locations south of the 49th parallel. Working in the expanded field of sculpture and installation, her practice encompasses new media and post-studio elements such as gardening, workshops, and meals. Her most recent body of work, Rates of Accumulation, encompasses a sound installation, a pirate radio broadcast, a four-channel video installation, a large scale drawing, and a series of performances. Diverse in form, this work is characterized equally by the stylistic influences of historical conceptualism, land art, and experimental radio.
Badger's work has investigated the time and politics of contemporary ecologies. With a tone both poetic and critical, she aims to sidestep the frustrations marring current debates around ecology. Projects such as Scatter and The Sound of Things That Are Too Big and Too Old initiate encounters with the city’s marginal landscapes and flora, abandoning received histories of North America in favor of abstract postcolonial narratives. Operating on an entirely different scale, Plants In Your Pants is a hands-on intervention into the politics of vaginal ecologies in patriarchal times.
"I cherish the moment when it is no longer possible to distinguish a work of art from its reception—when some aspect of the work comes to new life because it seeps out of its bounds, intermingling with its viewers. This is the phase change through which art ceases to be purely representative or reflective and becomes political. Through all of my pursuits, it is the desire for this transformation that keeps me going."
