Jessica Slipp | with & of (Becoming Rock)

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Jessica Slipp, “Becoming Rock (Sea Rock) (detail),” 2021

still from the video series, Becoming Rock (courtesy of the artist)

Opening Reception: Friday July 26^th, 7 -10 pm

with & of (Becoming Rock) is an immersive multi-media installation of an ongoing body of work by Jessica Slipp, a Montréal-based interdisciplinary artist, educator, and art activist. Presented as a multi-channel video installation alongside 17 paper sculptures, the project consists of forty video performances, each documenting different attempts to embody or merge with the land through the action of becoming a rock, visually, within the landscape. The videos – enhanced by an ambient soundscape and projected onto four walls of the gallery – play on loop and have neither a beginning nor end to their sequence, allowing only the changing of seasons to allude to the cyclical nature of time. In the surrounding space of the gallery, the paper sculptures are dispersed randomly to mimic rock formations. The rocks have been created by the artist wrapping her body in large-format digital prints made from both photographed and scanned rock textures and sitting with the land until she eventually becomes part of the landscape (successfully, or sometimes not). The prints are what form the accompanying paper sculptures presented alongside the videos, each carrying the folds, tears, and traces of their lifetime — akin to a rock, the land, or even flesh.

with & of (Becoming Rock) reconsiders the relationship between body and earth through the repeated action of the artist’s body engaging with the land. Through a multi-disciplinary practice comprised of photography, video, performance, sound, and sculpture, Jessica Slipp attempts to repattern perspectives towards a more caring and compassionate engagement with the world, seeking to blur boundaries between landscape and the way in which it is perceived by playing with the constructs of its original form.

As Jessica Slipp aptly states, “I am interested in what we see, what we notice and how we perceive it. The ways that place and identity are embedded in the land, and the interlaced and intrinsic connection we all share with the world—from the particles that randomly composed it, to the very nature that we embody. I believe that the more we understand these fundamental connections, the less we will see ourselves as separate from it. In this time of ecological crisis and global climate change, it is vitally important to shift anthropocentric modes of thinking about the world to thinking with the world.”