Dana Buzzee, Ripple, single-channel video, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
DANA BUZZEE
INCIDENTAL OMENS
12 OCTOBER 2024 - 11 JANUARY 2025
Incidental Omens envisions the invigorating possibilities of fantasy, altered states, and communal experience. Dana Buzzee draws from places of concentrated physical and psychological transformation such as: bathhouses, spas, dance clubs, and dungeons. Her installation of plastic harness strap-work, chains, tiled surfaces, and virtual water features, creates an ethereal and inclusive space for re-imagining utopian architectural spaces of healing, communing, and escapism.
Hanging from the ceiling of the gallery, otherworldly-scaled body harnesses and mystical acrylic sigils crafted from PVCs and acrylics contain unthinkable scales of time and biology. Beginning as organic matter of algae and animals from millions of years ago and refined through petrochemical processes, these plastics contain an apocalypse. Within the polymer harnesses and sigils, sexual desire and obsession converge with capitalistic longing and consumer fetishism.
These plastic works are shaped in ways that might contain or restrict the body, but plastics continue to alter our interior biology as well. Microplastics permeate the air we breathe and the blood in our veins, affecting, among other things, reproductive health. Future inheritors of the planet are becoming increasingly hybrid beings that exist beyond the dichotomies of organic and inorganic. In fact, it might even be more appropriate to think of Buzzee’s sculptures as bodies themselves. Their transparent, spectral forms are ghosts of the bodies that formed them as they hang waiting to be reanimated through the plastic bodies of the future.
Incidental Omens proposes a space beyond physical and psychological restraints. Buzzee describes the exhibition as if it was assembled far into the future by a retro-revivlaist cult, trying to make sense of the detritus and ancient plastics left over from our current age. Among the harness sculptures are laser-cut “sigils” and hand tool-like “implements” with tendrils that reach out, ready to be activated as part of a summoning ritual. This magic is needed to imagine the new spaces of the future. Extrapolating from current day spaces of bathouses or hot springs, Buzzee speculates on future spaces outside of productivity and efficiency. These are places of communing and healing where all are invited to partake in the rituals of a future utopia.
Curated by Adam Whitford, Associate Curator & Exhibitions Manager
Dana Buzzee is a visual artist and arts educator from Alberta, located on Treaty 7 land. Rooted in queer hauntology and materialism, Buzzee approaches their work as a narrative medium for speculative futurity. By shifting ubiquitous industrially-produced materials, particularly plastics, out of their conventional context in the built environment, Buzzee’s work questions our perception of these materials as neutral and leverages their long temporal reach to connect disparate timelines. Through critically exploring consumer fetishism's ties to extractive capitalist economies, particularly within counterculture communities, Buzzee’s sculpture-based installations gesture at fantasy, desire and notions of utopia.
Buzzee holds a B.F.A. from the Alberta College of Art and Design (Calgary, AB, 2012) and an M.F.A. from the University of Oregon (Eugene, OR, 2022). Recent residencies that Buzzee has participated in include the Studios at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA, 2024), The Banff Centre (Banff, AB, 2021) and the Icelandic Textile Center (Blondous, 2019). Their exhibition record includes shows at Orchid Contemporary (Hamilton, ON, 2023), HOT*BED (Philadelphia, PA, 2022), Ditch Contemporary (Springfield, OR, 2022), Eugene Contemporary (Eugene, OR, 2021), The Plumb (Toronto, ON, 2021), Harcourt House (Edmonton, AB, 2019) and Stride Gallery (Calgary, AB, 2018). Additionally, Buzzee's practice has received support through grants from the Calgary Arts Development Authority, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts. Buzzee is currently a Visiting Professor of Practice in the Studio Art Department at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX.
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1. Heather Davis, “Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures,” PhiloSOPHIA 5.2 (2015): 244-245.
Documentation photos by Blaine Campbell.
