Max Liboiron

In New Stories, fur and gravel create a pseudo-landscape on the floor with the “northern lights” above. Altered by a randomly revolving pinwheel, the shadows from the bags move, flow, and “freeze” on the path below. The ground is made of faux bear fur laced with butterflies and the gravel is mixed with sparkles and barely-discernable litter. Furry plants with music boxes inside, complete with revolving butterfly, play familiar tunes when wound alone, but when wound together create a scary, tinkling cacophony. The metaphors and atmosphere of the piece is created in response to testimonials of Canadians living the arctic about climate change, which are displayed with the piece. A flyer describing how to reduce carbon dioxide emissions was also available.

The source material for the drawings was spliced from early woodcuts by European explorers that emphasized the bountiful and ample environment of the New World. The animations are humorous re-narrations set to the audio tracks of educational videos about cloning, factory farming, animal domestication, wildlife management, and other contemporary narratives of abundance.

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