The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery is a contemporary art gallery located in downtown Montreal.
Together with Joëlle Dubé, I participated in the gallery's 2021 Expanding Exhibitions Residency, producing a web-based research project.
Access the website (FR/EN, desktop only).
Design
February – May 2021 (4 months, full-time)
Tiohtià:ke/Montreal
Rules of Extraction is a web-based research project that expands on the exhibition World of Matter: Exposing Resource Ecologies, presented at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery in 2015. World of Matter investigates the complex ecologies of primary materials through a series of exhibitions, events, publications and a multimedia platform. Rules of Extraction builds on the exhibition’s approaches and issues through a methodology that ‘thinks with water’ to unpack the extraction and dispossession perpetuated by Canadian mining companies, with a critical focus on the complex rules and norms upon which these extractions are built. These rules and norms reveal how ways of relating to more-than-human worlds are enshrined in law and embodied in practice.
Project origins The Expanding Exhibitions Residency pairs a graduating MA student in Art History with a graduating BFA student in Design. Shortlisted applicants then choose an exhibition from the Ellen Gallery’s curatorial history and expand on it in an original digitally-based research project. Joelle and I applied together, as we fit the profile and had already established a partnership through our work together with The Office of Rules and Norms. Shortlisted in March 2020, we developed our proposal through April, and received word of our selection in May.
Proposal As well as expanding on the focus and methods of World of Matter, we also took inspiration from Forensic Architecture, a research and design practice that draws extensively on 3D modeling to make distant and unseen destruction visible for court justice proceedings.
Process Joelle and I were given our own room to work out of for the duration of the residency, complete with ample whiteboard space that we took full advantage of.
Unlike in our other collaboration Future Generations, we adopted stricter roles for this project, although some fluidity remained. Joelle focused on the research and writing while I focused on the design and coding, building on the visual identity laid out in the proposal.
3D Modeling I had initially considered doing the modeling, but given the short timeframe and our ambitions for the project, we decided instead to collaborate with the visual artist Jean-François Robin, who created the 3D environments in Unity.
Landing The landing page showcases the updated colour palette: a pared-down black and white with a muddy red and hints of the colours representing each case study.
Core We introduce the user to our methodology on a page with a horizontal scroll that automatically increments against a repeating loop of a wave, giving the impression of being swept along by a tide.
Case studies Our project follows three water bodies located around the world that are presently threatened by Canadian-led mineral extraction. Each case study begins by looking at the ecology of the water body before delving into surrounding peoples and how their culture relates to water. The mining activities and legal infrastructure are also examined through this lens.
We opted to add modular elements like floating laws, maps, and questions, as well as photos to balance the simulatory nature of the 3D environments that feature in the background.
Each background environment highlights a different impact – in the case of the Porgera River, the impact is contamination, shown in the cloudy red trails of the simulated river.
Interwoven into each case study are philosophical concepts to deepen the user’s critical engagement with the information being presented. To draw attention to this shift in the flow of each case study, the background video switches perspectives – from following the surface of the water to pausing on the riverbanks (or, in the case of Lakes 1 & 2, at the bottom of the lake).
Launch The official launch of the project took place on October 26, 2021 over Zoom. We gave a walkthrough of the website and insight into our process, and also had the pleasure of discussing the project’s themes with a guest speaker, anthropologist Caroline Desbiens, whose work we cited extensively for the case study Lakes 1 & 2. A recording of the event is embedded below.