Raising our eyes Under Metallic Skies, Christina Battle’s environmental exhibition

Museum London’s new exhibition Under Metallic Skies features the work of Christina Battle, connecting her many projects. Battle is an Edmonton, Alberta based artist who earned her Ph.D at Western University. Battle’s environmental art focuses on climate change, land dynamics, and destruction. 

“Notes to self” is a video piece featuring a burning piece of paper which reads “The climate crisis is not equally distributed.”As the paper burns down,people in the Global South burn in the rising heat, their crops burn, their villages burn in the warfare for dwindling water and resources. This is a simple reminder, as we view museum exhibitions in the comfort of air conditioning, of the responsibility we hold to others on our planet. 

“Dearfield, Colorado” (2010) is an elegy to an African American settlement founded by Oliver Toussaint Jackson. Dearfield was a bid for African American Sovereignty in the hostile racial landscape of the United States after the Civil War and WWI. They sought self determination in a country that hated them and their freedom. Dearfield offered Black Americans a chance to thrive, but this was shuttered with the dust bowl conditions of the Great Depression. All that remains are a few skeletons of buildings and a memorial plaque. 

“The Community is not a Haphazard Collection of Individuals” is Battle’s ongoing participatory work, utilizing community engagement to plant seeds. The seed functions as a stand-in for both the individual and the community, because the mechanism of a seed may be individual, but they function as communities. The activation of the seed activates the participating individual as a member of the community, and planting becomes the means to participate in the community as an organic biome.  

Environmental dread has a powerful presence in all of Battle’s art, including in the piece “are we going to get blown off the planet [and what should we do about it]” (2022). Environmental destruction exists all around us, and lives within us. Yet these harrowing years of death are treated with tenderness. In the background florals, the small blooming plants, there is a remarkable tenderness with which Battle treats the inconsolable loss of biodiversity. 

The community engagement aspect of Battle’s exhibition gently counteracts the accompanying dread by giving museum goers the opportunity to take small but significant action. The opportunity to plant native plants to mitigate biodiversity loss is extremely meaningful in the face of an all-encompassing event like climate catastrophe. Planting a seed makes us feel just a little less powerless. 

Under Metallic Skies will be on exhibition at Museum London in London Ontario from June 1st to November 3rd, 2024.