A PhD candidate at Western University for Arts and Visual Culture has her thesis exhibition on display this month.
Ashley Snook, A Body Within a Body Within a Body [detail], 2021-2022, Image courtesy of the artist
The exhibition features sculpture, drawing, video and instillations that allows for a more personal experience and is the culmination of 12 years of post-secondary education.
“I don’t know if it’s a point of exhaustion or it’s too surreal to really be able to reflect on how I feel at the moment,” says Ashley Snook while speaking about how it feels to be so close to her goal. “Especially with my exhibition going on now, I feel like maybe four months after I actually complete my PhD I’ll be like ‘oh wow… I did that. That’s huge’.”
The exhibition ended up being more personal than she expected it to be, especially for an academic project.
“It’s exposing. In a way it feels like a diary entry almost with the way I feel about my personal connections to the Earth and to people and nonhuman species around me,” says Snook. “I just really hope it allows for an opportunity for people to step back and to reconsider their perspectives at whole.”
Each component of her exhibition is individualized but collectively they work together and tell a story while also being an interactive experience.
Ashley Snook, the honey is sweet [detail], 2020-2021, Image courtesy of the artist
The concept of reworlding is also a large part of her exhibition, a term often used by author Donna Haraway which can be very simplistically defined as “reimagining our spaces” and where “everything has a possibility of change and with that we work together”.
“We can’t just put on a band-aid and things work out on [their] own,” says Snook. “We take what we have and we reworld it in a way where we mend relationships with people, humans, nonhumans and the environment. Mending relationships and considering more ways of being proactive in doing better for the environment.”
Her art explores themes of interconnectivity between human and nonhuman animals, and botanical/vegetable life. Her current work “revolves around the notion of animality, proposing a historically informed, post-human perspective regarding animality, with the intent to problematize a spectrum of human-centric, socio-cultural and scientific frameworks”.
NODES | Animality and Kinship is now open at McIntosh Gallery! 🎉 Join us this Thursday, July 7 from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. at our first opening reception since Winter 2020. Admission is free and all are welcome. For more information, see https://t.co/CntZu7px9A #LdnOnt
pic.twitter.com/qv9CmByBTG— McIntosh Gallery (@McIntoshGallery) July 5, 2022
She explains that the Western perspective of animality—which refers to qualities or nature associated with animals—has been historically used to colonize and dehumanize as well as place nonhumans in the lowest hierarchical position.
“Through my research and along with these 12 years of post-secondary education I’ve been searching for a term that reflects my position and confusion on the human condition and it always returned back to ‘animality’,” says Snook. “It’s important that term is reframed in a way where we can connect with it because, ultimately, we are animals. That’s our foundation, that’s our core.”
A reception for NODES | Animality and Kinship is planned for Thursday, June 7th between 5 and 7 p.m. at the McIntosh gallery.
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