Kasper Feyrer: Turn Toward. Installation documentation, Audain Gallery, 2023. Photos: Rachel Topham Photography.
Kasper Feyrer: Turn Toward
OCT 20 – DEC 16 2023
Audain Gallery
Vancouver-based artist Kasper Feyrer presents a series of new works that connect creative research in mycology to understandings of care, more-than-human relations, and queer intimacies through visibility and embodiment. Feyrer’s long-standing material engagement in filmmaking uses the camera as an extension of the human sensorium, as a “device through which one can feel time and mirror perception, expanding one’s embodied experience of the world."
The environment of works in Turn Toward uphold powerful queer ideas of ecology, which inherently demonstrate qualities of lived sensitivity towards more relational ways of being. Turn Toward debuts the film O’on (2022), a haunting mythology of transformation. “O’on” is the phonetic root form of the word “egg” — suggesting a cosmic interrogation of self-concepts and emergent identities through metaphors of queerness, birth, growth, sexuality and embodiment, death, and loss.
Alongside the film, Feyrer has produced sculptural works made of the mycelium from Artist’s Conk [Ganoderma applanatum], a decomposer-fungi which plays an important role in the cycling of nutrients through forest ecologies. The sculptures were composed and cultivated in Feyrer’s studio, which doubles as a mushroom cultivation lab.
In a further series of works, the practical tools of mushroom cultivation — such as liquid cultures, petri dishes, and chemistry glass — are reformed into imaginary objects, inspiring the scenographic backdrop for a future iterative film work. A series of cyclical hourglass wheels are additionally presented, made in collaboration with SFU Chemistry glassblower Lucas Clarke. Each hand-blown glass wheel is a self-contained time-keeping device: keeping time instead of telling it.
Feyrer shares knowledge learned from their ongoing collaboration with fungi, realized through a network of artworks within an impermanent, living timeline: disrupting the dualities of subject and object through de-centering human ontologies. By extending affirmative and regenerative symbolism toward transgender allegories, Turn Toward poetically transcribes a cultural understanding of the aliveness and associative resonances of fungi as collaborators.
Curated by Kristy Trinier
An artist book connected to the exhibition will be co-produced and distributed by SFU Galleries and Publication Studio 66B. Research and production assistance towards the exhibition was gratefully provided to the artist by SFU Biologist Dr. Zamir Punja and SFU Chemistry glass artisan Lucas Clarke. The expected publication date is December 2023.
Kasper Feyrer was born in lək̓ʷəŋən Territory, and now lives and works on the unceded territories of the səlilwətaɬ, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm. They root their practice in an embodied engagement with celluloid filmmaking and sculpture, with emphasis on the body’s relationship to these media. Feyrer graduated with a Meisterschülerin from the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany in 2010, and received a Bachelor of Media Arts, Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design in 2004. They have held solo exhibitions at Dazibao, Montreal (2019); Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver (2018); POTTS, Los Angeles (2017); Western Front, Vancouver (2014); Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver (2012); and Artspeak, Vancouver (2010). Their work has been included in group exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2017, 2016); the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton (2013); and Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver (2012). In collaboration with artist Tamara Henderson, Feyrer has presented exhibitions at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2016); Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver (2016); Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia (2015); and Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff (2013).
Events
Opening Reception
Thursday, October 19 / 7 – 9PM
Audain Gallery
Nature Walk with Willoughby Arevalo and Kasper Feyrer
Saturday, October 28 / 2 –4 PM
To RSVP email audaingallery@sfu.ca
Book Launch and Exhibition Tour
Saturday, December 2 / 2 –4 PM
Audain Gallery
Support Material
