The View From Where

The View from Where is an exhibit at the UofA FAB Gallery Second floor, running until November 5. 

Artist alissa rossi uses her experience of the boreal forest of British Columbia and western Alberta to explore how global extractive capitalism and the ongoing climate crisis manifest on a local level. 

rossi grew up in the Fraser Valley in BC with a family whose income was directly connected to the forestry industry. She spent her childhood summers in the Chilcotin-Caribou where mountain pine beetle adapted their behaviour leading to the destruction of much of BC’s pine forest.

Her work counters the human- and western-centric ideas of the Anthropocene—a name for the current geological era marked by human activity—where she explores how the human, the technological, and the ecological are not separate from but deeply enmeshed with each other. 

She proposes a view of ecology that sees humans and our technologies not as separate from and superior to the ecological world, but as one of several forces that shape it, a view from which we might more successfully negotiate the ongoing and cataclysmic shifts in climate.