Patel brown East | 184 Munro st

alex sheriff | Closing parties

February 05 - March 27 2021

Closing Parties is an exhibition of new work by Alex Sheriff that includes mixed media collage works on paper, a woven tapestry, ceramic sculptures, and an animated video.

It is commonly said with growing frequency – though it is important to note that it has not been inducted into official geological nomenclature – that we are currently living in the ‘anthropocene epoch.’ This means that we are in a new geological era in which humans are the dominant force, influencing significant change in the planet’s climate environment. Urbanization, agriculture, and fast-growing populations have resulted in deforestation, major extinctions, global warming, climate crises, and countless other buzzwords whose popularity have also risen like the Earth’s temperatures and C02 emmisions. This list of global side effects looks bad. From many perspectives it is bad, for all the reasons we are generally aware of. However, for those in need of a guiding beacon, there is an optimistic theorized ‘good anthropocene.’ It’s a future where economies are restructured, indigenous communities are engaged, and knowledge and technology are used to restore and maintain an ideal eco-harmony with all the planet’s inhabitants. 

For this period to be labelled as simply good or bad, or maybe to even label it at all, could be viewed as an interesting but also arrogant or misguided act. It’s wise to remember that the Anthropocene, like The Holecene Epoch (which we are officially still in in 2021) and The Pleistocene before it, are periods of The Earth’s history – not our species’ history. Earth’s previous epochs range from millions to hundreds of millions of years and the Holocene only began roughly 12,000 years ago. Yes, the impact of our species is noticeable, but if we were all gone tomorrow, what lasting evidence of us would remain in 100,000 or 1 million years? – we’re small change in the grand scheme of the planet. The unofficial coining of the Anthropocene (good or bad or ugly) feels inspired by our constant habit of trying to remove ourselves from natural history and nature in general by recording it and ‘claiming’ it. This is of course impossible, but with futile attempts we keep at it. A quick interruption for trivia: Before humans discovered Mt. Everest, what was the tallest mountain on Earth? (I’ll tell you later.)

Recording history through writing, art, and orally in the deliberate and biased way that we do, is a trademark of our species and is fundamentally human. Cleanly divided chunks of time are important to humans and we often celebrate or acknowledge them in an act or ritual that summarizes and memorializes the life lived, tasks accomplished, and feelings felt within their span: end of the year, end of the day, birthdays, anniversaries, end of a presidency, end of a war, a dynasty, a retirement, a graduation, labor day weekend, a renovation, a paint job, a post break-up haircut, a series finale, a funeral, a closing party, the apocalypse.

Although rooted in themes surrounding the Anthropocene, the works in Closing Parties are by no means to satisfy the need for an ecological call-to-action, nor are they a warning. Is a major extinction bad? For example, without the end of the dinosaurs, you and I and the rest of the mammal team would never have come to be, but the late dodos could have done without us. The collages are an exploration of our conflicting attitudes, both personally and as a global society, as we glimpse our species’ potential conclusion from several different angles, many of them self- arranged. The works aim to be as conflicted and confused as the attitudes towards our species’ mortality, and as futile as our desire to be separate from nature. While the characters in the collaged work are strange humans, or at least human-like, it’s difficult to attach them to a specific time or place.

All the works in the show deal with the acknowledgment of death and extinction with ambivalence; a sleeping house cat must be as nonchalant as a thing can get in Extinction Blanket. A blanket is a cozy luxury but also a physical and psychological defense mechanism. A child can protect itself from the darkest possibilities below the bed with it. An adult can sweep the dirt under it. Good or bad, blankets cover all. The video work, Generation Motivation, constantly shrinks life’s progress/struggle and death’s impact as it aims to shift the temporal consequences of a lifespan – human or otherwise. The animation casually glosses over death like a speed-bump. Death happens often and to whole species. Try and try and try again, it suggests. 

Perhaps the largest oxymoron comes with the exhibition’s call to wholly ‘rejoin’ natural history and to, adopt the viewpoints of other things of Earth, expanding beyond thinking in only-human terms. Silly artist human: creating art and hypothesizing is part of what defines us, and is inescapable. 

Anyway, we are at the party and that is certain. It may be a closing party, and I’m not quite sure of the protocol but I hope we can still try to enjoy some of it. The answer is: It was still Mt Everest.