For more than 20 years, Toronto photo-based artist Sara Angelucci has transformed found photographs and created images exposing the cultural and historical conditions outside the image frame. Her work brings attention to the social forces that generate the language of photography. Her series Aviary — which morphs extinct and endangered birds with 19th-century cartes-de-visite portraits — reveals the colonizing role the camera played in capturing animals for consumption. In her current work, Nocturnal Botanical Ontario, images of entwined native and invasive plants — made with a digital scanner — pay homage to photography as a tool of scientific inquiry. These complex botanical compositions uncover the impacts of settler colonialism and global trade on our ecology. Through acts of empathy, embodiment, and envisioning, the images and essays in Undergrowth seek to reconcile our fraught relationship with the natural world, addressing one of the most critical issues of our time.
Undergrowth is a co-publication with Art Gallery Sudbury | Galerie d'art de Sudbury.