With Satellite Berlin – Art in collaboration presents Canadian Artist Patricia Coates during her 6 months residency in Berlin, granted by the CANADA COUNCIL for the ARTS and the Ontario Arts Council.
Her Alter-Ego Lucy Palustris ventured to Berlin via transatlantic migration. “Project Seed Vault” (random mutation) will explore transgenic, invasive and threatened species along with a whole bunch of flora and fauna specimens and 'madlab' paraphernalia raising questions of the potential repercussions of tampering with biological evolution. Follow the developments of Patricia's work in Berlin here. With kind support of the Embassy of Canada Berlin
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In Berlin, Lucy explores the beauty and brutality of a degraded landscape while contemplating our transient existence within it. A call for restitution plays out like a Sisyphean gesture. Fecundity and death, care and violence are set against each other to create a psychic tension. Remnants of the wall set the scene probing issues of the Anthropocene while creeping into the physiological landscape of Lucy - a solitary woman who manifests a conflicted relationship with the living world. Is she an agency of care, or a menacing presence? A tragic-comedic tone permeates her actions and costume. Her work seems tenacious yet quixotic. Is Lucy (or is of art itself) a futile intervention or a necessary resistance? Perhaps there are bits of Lucy in all of us -- in our complicity and in our resilience. Gathering nettles (Urtica dioica) |
Decommissioned animal stable. Two hours west of Berlin. Photo © Nora Novak A clownish and rather slatternly scarecrow. Rural Germany. Photo © Nora Novak |
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