Megan Green

Lives and works in Toronto, ON, Canada

Artist statement

In my visual art practice I am interested in objects that exist ambiguously in a space between conceptual art and home décor. My impulse here comes from an understanding that domestic decorative objects are particularly rich in terms of what they reveal about the desires of the cultural groups that adorn their personal spaces with them. Generally, I approach such objects in two ways, first as a marker of nostalgic identity and also as aspirational. I attempt to use objects and their associated narratives to contextualize industrial mining in the geo-cultural landscape; specifically examining class and personal experiences I have had growing up in northern Canada around the ‘tar-sands;’ a region that is often considered the worst example of natural resource mining and described in apocalyptic terms. Animal remains represent a way into the colonial nature of the Canadian relationship with the landscape; there is a through line running from the Canadian fur trade to our current predicament as a petrostate. The image in "Home Décor" is of a Fort McMurray resident and oil sands worker; from the driveway the figure stands on, to the pickup truck in the background, every material feature of this image relates to oil. The work responds to how Canada is both a nation with an identity defined in relation to its wilderness, and one that relies on natural resource extraction. In my work I explore the sort of encounters the remote spaces of mining engender, and what might be seen in...

Artwork