For more than 20 years, Toronto photo-based artist Sara Angelucci has
transformed found photographs and created images exposing the cultural
and historical conditions outside the image frame. Her work brings
attention to the social forces that generate the language of
photography. Her series Aviary -- which morphs extinct and endangered
birds with 19th-century cartes-de-visite portraits -- reveals the
colonizing role the camera played in capturing animals for consumption.
In her current work, Nocturnal Botanical Ontario, images of entwined
native and invasive plants -- made with a digital scanner -- pay homage
to photography as a tool of scientific inquiry. These complex botanical
compositions uncover the impacts of settler colonialism and global trade
on our ecology. Through acts of empathy, embodiment, and envisioning,
the images and essays in Undergrowth seek to reconcile our fraught
relationship with the natural world, addressing one of the most critical
issues of our time.
Undergrowth is a co-publication with Art Gallery Sudbury Galerie d'art
de Sudbury.
