Artful Naturalism, a new exhibit at the Redpath Museum, brings together contemporary artworks and the permanent collections of the Redpath Museum to ask, “How do we order the world today and human beings’ place within it??
Featuring artworks from artists Gabriel Dharmoo and Nadia Huggins, as well as an installation conceptualized by Professor Hillary Kaell and graduate students from the Department of Anthropology, the exhibit invites us to reflect on and reimagine the boundaries between “natural” and “unnatural”, human and animal, spiritual and earthly.
Dawson’s Legacy: The Marriage of Science and Religion
Kaell, who is cross appointed in the School of Religious Studies and the Department of Anthropology, joined McGill in 2020, and was awarded a William Dawson Research Chair. Fun fact: the award is named after Sir John William Dawson who was a noted geologist and served as McGill Principal from 1855-1893.
Kaell’s curiosity was piqued when she learned that Dawson, who was a huge contributor to the field of natural sciences in Canada, was also a devout Presbyterian Christian, raised in what we would today call a “fundamentalist” Presbyterian Church, which viewed the Bible as the literal word of God.
“Dawson did not see fundamentalist Christianity as somehow separate from being a cutting-edge natural scientist,” says Kaell. “He saw both of those things as really working in tandem, he believed that every kind of discovery that he was making geologically was helping to unearth the order that God had created. [For Dawson], better understanding God’s order helped humans better understand God and connect to God.”
“Once I learnt this about Dawson, I thought, what better person to inspire me, than one who works at the intersection of religion and ecology!” says Kaell.
Kaell is also the director and founder of the TERA Collective, an exploration of collective thinking about technology, ecology, and religion. Founded at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the collective brought together a group of five scholars and two artists to reinterpret their own version of a “new” natural history society. Together, they would discuss various items, such as pieces of writing, physical objects and even artworks, through the lens of interconnectedness of technology, ecology, religion and art.
These discussions gave way to the idea of mounting an exhibit about art in conversation with the themes of Dawson’s legacy.
“The exhibit is an opportunity to wrestle with the boundaries between religion and science,” says Dr. Martin Miller, a Post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology, who worked with Kaell and graduate students on the art installation Dawson’s Desk, which is featured in the exhibit.
“As an anthropologist, I am very interested in how religious histories shape secular cultures and societies in often unrecognized ways,”says Miller. “When we see science and religion as historically interwoven, we can also invite dialogue about the kinds of spiritual and ecological futures their relationship might lead us toward.”
Examining Anthropology and Religion Through Art
Kaell invited Montreal-based performance artist Gabriel Dharmoo, PhD, and St-Vincent-based visual artist Nadia Huggins, both members of the TERA collective, to contribute their work to the exhibit.
“Gabriel and Nadia’s work really cross the boundaries between humans and other species, or between this world and other worlds,” says Kaell. “Nadia thinks a lot about the undersea world and about mythology [...] what is fleeting and part of a different world, an underwater world. Gabriel who is a trained composer, creates new linguistic forms with his voice and instrumentality, questioning ideas such as, what is knowledge, what is language?”
The artworks in the exhibit are interspersed throughout the museum’s floors and represent the spiritual essence of Dawson’s natural history museum; a keen interest in the natural world, and our relationship within it (spiritual or not), interpreted through artistic mediums. From a series of photographs that explore the underwater world of the Caribbean Sea, to visual portraits of fictional characters crossing the boundary of human and animal, offering a reinterpretation of the natural world through art.
The exhibit also includes an installation entitled Dawson’s Desk (or the Soul of Science) which was created by Kaell and a team of graduate students:, Sophie Ji (MA), Danika Brockman (PhD) and Katie Khatereh Taher (PhD) and post-doctoral fellow Dr. Martin Miller.
Located in its own room on the second floor of the museum, the public can take a seat at Dawson’s desk.
“We describe our installation as walking into Dawson’s mind,” says Kaell. “We were playing around with Alex Calder’s idea of the ‘mobile’ and ‘stabile’. During Dawson’s time, there were all these new ideas that were circulating in the world that were mobile, but at the same time, for Dawson and many people of his era, there was the stability of the Bible.”
Dawson’s Desk is covered with Bible verses – which are the “stabile” elements of the art piece. These passages were cited by Dawson and represent the stability Dawson would have clung to as he furthered his inquiries into the natural world.
The desk is surrounded by hanging glass globes, the “mobile", which house different objects representing Dawson’s writings and sketches and different elements of the natural world he would have collected through his work.
“We recreated Dawson's desk to encourage visitors to think about the history of the museum they were in, and to question the boundaries between religion and science,” adds Sophie Ji, who is pursuing her MA degree in Anthropology. “This project was an opportunity to conduct anthropology creatively, and to think about how bible pages, pressed flowers and plastic balls could help us represent tensions and conversations between religion and science.”
Artful Naturalism will be open at the Redpath Museum from January 17 to February 21, with a live performance by artist Gabriel Dharmoo on February 21.