Sara Angelucci: Undergrowth

Sara Angelucci is a Toronto-based artist working in photography, video, and audio. She has exhibited her work across Canada in solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of York University, Le Mois de la Photo in Montreal, VU in Quebec City, the Toronto Photographers Workshop, the MacLaren Art Centre, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Richmond Art Gallery, and Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery in Halifax. Internationally, she has had solo exhibitions at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, the Lianzhou Foto Festival, and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston. Her work has been featured in numerous group shows in the US, Europe, and in China at the Pingyao and Beijing Biennales. She completed her BA at the University of Guelph and her MFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Angelucci is an adjunct professor in photography at the School of Image Arts, Metropolitan University, Toronto. She is represented by Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto. 

www.sara-angelucci.ca

Sara Angelucci transforms found photographs and creates images exposing the cultural and historical conditions outside the image frame, bringing attention to the social forces that generate the language of photography. Undergrowth brings together several bodies of work produced over the last decade that examine the ways in which photographic practices have contributed to the divide between humans and nature. This direction found its impetus in her series Aviary (2013), which morphs extinct and endangered birds with nineteenth-century carte-de-visite portraits to reveal the colonizing role the camera has played in capturing animals for consumption. This focus continues across an expansive body of work that culminates in Nocturnal Botanical Ontario (2019–ongoing) in which images of entwined native, introduced, and invasive plants made with a digital scanner consider the history of botanical photography through the study of species that exist in the artist’s immediate proximity. These complex botanical compositions point to the impacts of settler colonialism and global trade on our ecology. Through acts of empathy, embodiment, and envisioning, Angelucci’s practice seeks to examine and reconcile our relationship with the natural world. Positioned at the Art Gallery of Sudbury—the site of the turn-of-the-century Bellrock Mansion—Undergrowth is intended to resonate with the history of this space and the lives of its prominent, wealthy owners.

Shannon Anderson currently serves as the curator for the Art Gallery of Mississauga and has previously held the position of art curator for the Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital. As an independent curator and writer of contemporary art, she has generated exhibitions for galleries across Canada, including the Blackwood Gallery in Mississauga, Musée d’art de Joliette, Oakville Galleries, Plug In ICA in Winnipeg, Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery in Halifax, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, and the Surrey Art Gallery, among others. She has written essays for publications produced by numerous art galleries and has contributed texts to Art Papers, Azure, Border Crossings, Canadian Art, C Magazine, Carousel, Designlines, EyeMazing Amsterdam, and the Globe and Mail.