Superstratum

Superstratum is a survey of the Earth’s surface—a new layer in the making.

In this exhibition, Morgan Wedderspoon brings together found objects and borrowed text* to inquire into the relationship between the inconsistent human subject and the escalating crisis of anthropogenic global warming. Her works, playfully ethnographic in tone, embrace subjectivity, speculation and free association. Taking cues from a good old dog named after a Greek poet, Wedderspoon follows her whims to pick up all kinds of things found on the ground while walking. What can be gleaned in the aggregate?

With just eleven years to limit global warming, what transformation is possible? Could these residues of our ways of living be reaching out to help avert disaster? What can they teach us about care, rebellion, and what we’re made of?

*Text is borrowed from Margaret Atwood’s Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (the list of human responses to crisis reads: Protect Yourself, Give Up and Party, Help Others, Blame, Bear Witness, Go About Your Life and, for war specifically, Fight and Surrender).

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Morgan Wedderspoon is an artist working in print media and found-object sculpture, including artist’s books and print-based installations. Her ongoing creative research explores ecology, poetry, and speculative thought, often sampling from written texts and an array of objects collected from the ground. She is a graduate of Queen’s University (2009) and holds an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Alberta (2016). Recent exhibition sites include the Novosibirsk State Art Museum (Russia), Taoxichuan Art Museum (China), Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art (Poland), Petrocultures 2018 Conference (Scotland) and SNAP Gallery (Edmonton). She is a recipient of the Special Award of the Rector of the Fine Arts Academy in Katowice (International Print Triennial Society, Krakòw, Poland) and a Research and Creation Grant (Canada Council for the Arts) for a current project with collaborator Angela Snieder. Wedderspoon lives in Edmonton, Alberta, where she teaches printmaking at the University of Alberta.