Each element of our environs, whether animate or inanimate, contains evidence of its own history and alludes to the conditions that shaped it. Sean Alward’s painting practice is an imaginative, research-driven inquiry that extends from these facts. For several years the artist has mixed his own paints from materials he has gathered on exploratory hikes around Coast Salish territories, including Burnaby Mountain. He animates these materials, which include coal dust, clay, minerals, algae and pollen — each with its own natural and social history — as a means to interrogate his own implication in their transformation into economic “resources,” and to consider his relationship to both human and non-human agents of change. Alward works with matter to think critically about it, so his paintings are both physical objects and conceptual tools with which to shape questions about humankind’s entangled existence within our environment.

One of Alward’s points of departure for the new works comprising this exhibition was Condensation Cube, a sculpture created between 1963 and 1968 by German conceptual artist Hans Haacke, with whom Alward studied in New York. A sealed, transparent acrylic cube holding about one centimetre of water, Condensation Cube responds to the environmental conditions in which it is placed. Because of the temperature differential inside and outside of the cube, water vapour condenses into droplets and runs down the inside walls in ever-changing patterns. In this early work, which would prepare the ground for his later critique of institutional systems, Haacke was informed by the ideas of Austrian biologist and philosopher Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who argued that every living organism is an open system that continuously changes depending on its dialogue or interaction with its environment.