In a collection of beautifully unnerving sculptures, a Saskatchewan artist encourages the self-reflection of his viewers about how their habits impact the world around them. 

Jude Griebel, along with his unique exhibition, Illuminated Collapse, visited the Art Gallery of Swift Current all the way from his current base in New York on Friday evening.  

“This work has been touring since 2018, and some of the most important presentations of it, I felt, have been in smaller places and communities where people are able to discuss the ideas with me,” Griebel said. “So, I really value having it here in Swift Current.”

With a background rooted in his family’s practices of farm life in central Alberta and city life in Saskatoon, he described the beginning of his sculpture journey as one that was inspired by, and therefore told the stories of, the prairies.  

“When I was young there was right away a very strong relationship between the ground and the body for me,” Griebel said. “Thinking about animals being raised, being butchered, going into us, going back into the ground, crops being raised, going into the body, and the ground. So, these boundaries between body and ground were a little more blurred for me at that time than maybe someone in a city might consider them.

“A lot of my earlier sculptures were quite preoccupied with farming agriculture, and that pretty soon moved to thinking about the harm we're doing to the world around us, as well as good. I was looking at things like large agriculture businesses and factory farming, how that in in turn impacts the land we're on and then how that impacts our bodies." 

The pieces currently displayed at the Art Gallery of Swift Current are a collection of personified landscapes, with hints at global consumption, extinction of species, and an end-of-times narrative.  

Illuminated Collapse is comprised of eight sculptures crafted with a variety of earthy materials such as hand-carved wood and paper mâché. The exhibition came to life in 2017, during a three-year residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York. 

“Living in New York, I got to see global consumption playing out on a much larger and active basis,” Griebel said. “My studio there was in a very hard industrial area, like a lot of artist spaces there, and [I was] seeing tides of garbage come on and off the street—really getting a sense of these global consumption habits playing out in the city, what it takes to feed a city like that, and the amount of waste it creates. That became a big sort of reference point for me to work from."  

The bases of each sculpture being round shows the idea of a collapsed or flattened world, while also allowing viewers to walk around each piece and notice the details.

"I wanted to keep people immersed in the detail," Griebel said. "[As if] the scene was playing out before they really confronted the ideas that were being put forward. You maybe feel like you're there, before you have to understand what exactly is happening."

Illuminated Collapse is featured at the Art Gallery of Swift Current until June 24, with one sculpture now part of their permanent collection.  

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