Ivey Galleries, Second Level
For two decades, Edmonton-based artist Christina Battle has innovated the forms contemporary art can take–video series, participatory web-based projects, and iterative multimedia installations–to sound a public address about our shared future on a damaged planet as a result of natural resource extraction, pollution, and human-caused global warming.
Battle, who earned her PhD at Western University in London, focuses her work around familiar and neglected events in history, the ongoing flow of digital mass media information, and at times, her own personal reflections. She juxtaposes traditional materials and younger digital technologies in combinations that are aesthetically and socially evocative, subverting their intended forms and uses. Embedded at the centre of each of her projects are prompts to universal action over the state of the Earth.
Battle considers the experience of disaster and points to ways that art can instigate change. Her work is intricate, drawing not only on her training in contemporary art but from the biological, computer and social sciences, media studies, philosophy, and even speculative fiction. These inform the content, creation and presentation of her art, and result in monumental statements and visions produced often with modest materials. In Under Metallic Skies, some of the artist’s ongoing projects have been reconfigured. Older and newer pieces are presented in proximity to one another to encourage expanded or new interpretations. These involve ideas of emergence and alternative, more equitable economies, and remediation on both biological and social scales.
Image: Christina Battle, are we going to get blown off the planet (and what should we do about it), 2022, video installation (single-channel HD digital video, collaged fabric, wallpaper element designed by Anahì Gonzalez Teran and Shurui Wang), Collection of Museum London, Purchase, John H. and Elizabeth Moore Acquisition Fund, 2022
Artist bio
Portrait of Christina Battle Courtesy the Artist.
Christina Battle is based in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta). She has a B.Sc. specializing in Environmental Biology (University of Alberta), a certificate in Film Studies (Toronto Metropolitan University), an MFA (San Francisco Art Institute), and a PhD in Art & Visual Culture (Western University). She has exhibited internationally as both artist and curator.