In honour of World Water Day, the University of New Brunswick Arts Centre organized its annual exhibit, which explored environmental themes.
Every March 22, the United Nations celebrates World Water Day, an initiative that supports the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation by 2030.
Running from March 7 to May 2 at Memorial Hall, the exhibition displays the work of Kye Go and Noah Poirier in the East Gallery and Greg Davies’ paintings in the West Gallery.
This exhibit has taken place since 2011.
Marie Maltais, director of the UNB Arts Centre, shared some words at the opening, highlighting the purpose of the exhibit.
“The artists we showcase in our World Water Day exhibition, document, critique and reflect the world around them, declaring a powerful role in educating and bearing witness to the times that we live in.”
Go, one of the artists included in the exhibition, is a self-taught visual artist whose main focus is on sculpture.
His experience living in St. John, an industrial city surrounded by the beach, had the strongest influence on him becoming an environmental artist. The shoes, rubber bands, lobster bands and waste pushed him to take action.
“I want to challenge how we see the world, our relationship with the environment – with society, with what we throw away,” they said.
Poirier is an artist who is also distinguished by his exuberant and colorful depictions of the hidden nature of water.
He said that water is so fundamental that people take it for granted.
Part of Poirier’s motivation for making art on water was to highlight its value, hoping to inspire action to preserve and care for it.
“When I say water, we don’t have an emotional reaction. It doesn’t stir anything within us. You say it enough times, it loses meaning,” he said. “I wanted to sort of touch on it to really click, get us to feel emotionally invested.”
Davies, whose work is about experiencing art as something dark and unsettling, created the series titled In Divinis, which depicts endangered and extinct animals.
His technique adopts a tenebrist style influenced by Baroque art and the early Romantic paintings of the 19th century.
“It shows the impacts of human interaction between behaviour on animals and violence is explicit in that particular image,” he said.
The artists did not know that their artwork would be displayed next to each other at the exhibition.
Davies, as a curator, said that Go’s sculptures of contamination complemented the suffering of maritime animals that Davies depicts in his paintings.
The contrasting techniques of each artist made the exhibition eye-catching and thought-provoking, paying tribute to environmental causes and fostering deep reflection on change.
