‘Working Ground’ exhibition opens at Miller Museum of Geology

Once a wetland, then a landfill, later a golf course, and now a shared green space that holds traces of all its past lives—Belle Park has a complex history.

Working Ground, a new art exhibition housed in the Miller Museum of Geology, opened on Oct. 30. It was produced by the Belle Park Project, an ongoing research and art initiative that uses creative practice to explore how colonialism, ecology, and community shape the area’s landscape. Out of this collaboration grew the Belle Park Project, Working Ground invites viewers to see the land as a living manifestation of change.

Various elements of the park’s history were on display at the exhibit’s opening Oct. 30, such as a compilation of aerial video footage from past years, small pieces of land, and a piece titled “LAWNCARE” which displayed flags made from synthetic materials like tarps and thick plastics. Working Ground was in sharp contrast to the other rocks and minerals on display at Miller.

Laura Murray, a professor of English at Queen’s and one of the project’s developers, said in an interview with The Journal that the project emerged from an interest in the lesser-seen histories tied to certain locations.

“It really arose because [co-developer] Dorit Naaman and I’ve been colleagues and friends for a long time,” she said. “We’re both very interested in these layers of histories that aren’t always known, or in some cases are actively repressed.” As a shoreline area that has undergone multiple transformations over the years, Belle Park was an area of interest for the duo.

“We realized that it had been a wetland, and then it had been made into a dump, and then it had been made into a golf course, and then the city had a master plan to make it all sort of shiny and modern,” Murray said.

Murray and Naaman teamed up with artist Noah Scheinman to consider the “environmental [and] colonial history” of Belle Park, collaborating on the exhibition to explore how humans shape and are shaped by environmental spaces. The exhibit also aims to bring art into dialogue with scientific and academic spaces.

“We’re very lucky the geology department agreed to have this [Working Ground] up for about a year,” Murray said. “It’s about encouraging imagination, to think in a more three-dimensional way about our relationship to time and place.”

Part of the exhibition is a piece titled Belle Park from the Air, a film by Murray and Naaman comprising a century’s worth of aerial photographs of the park. Sweeping views of the shoreline inspire breathtaking wonder, something that emotionally resonated with me as I surveyed an area so close to home in Kingston.

“Aerial photographs are routinely taken of the whole world, originally for military purposes or resource extraction,” Murray said. “In this case, we use them as a bit of time travel.” Murray hopes that showing Belle Park as a wetland will make it “real” for viewers.

The film, paired with a soundscape by composer Matt Rogalski, creates what Murray described as “a bit [of a] meditative experience,” adding, “It’s informational, but it’s also open-ended. It makes you think about how ‘the way things are’ is only a moment in time.”

Scheinman expanded upon Murray’s ideas of permanence in a written statement to The Journal. “I wanted to explore and develop ways that might allow them [Belle Park’s histories] to be considered not as discrete, tightly bounded events in space and time, but rather as entangled, ongoing, and dynamic,” he wrote.

Reflecting on what the project has taught her, Murray said she continues to grapple with its dualities. “I’m always struggling with the beauty and the violence coexisting,” she said. “Because I do think it’s a beautiful place as it is now. There are beautiful relationships there, beautiful plants, birds. And yet, beneath all of it, there’s a deep and complicated history. What you see isn’t necessarily what you get.”

The exhibition’s currently on display at the Miller Museum of Geology.

Tags

Art, Belle Park Project, exhibit, Miller Museum of Geology, museum, Noah Scheinman

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