January 16, 2025
ORNAMUSHROOMS OF LUNENBURG
Cat Bluemke, Artist in Residence
EXHIBITION: Jan. 16th to 30th, 2024.
Gallery hours are by chance or appointment, Monday to Friday, 10am to 4pm.
ARTIST TALK & OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, January 16th, 2024 at 7:00pm.
This is a free event, no registration required.
Cat Bluemke’s “Ornamushrooms of Lunenburg” playfully weaves the Town’s architectural heritage with speculative future ecologies through experimental sculpture. Reproducing Lunenburg’s vernacular ornamentation through 3D models and mycelium, her “Ornamnushrooms” probe the tension in our relationships to housing and food security amidst the global crisis of climate change. As both recent transplant and town resident, the Artist situates her process within a historical lineage of adapting new technologies to local tastes. The exhibition explores a provocative dialogue between rot and renewal in coastal communities. Can we embrace the decay of our social fabric, if it proves fertile ground to grow a new future?
Cat Bluemke (b. 1993, Waterloo ON) is a digital artist working in software design, mixed reality, and performance. Often releasing projects as Tough Guy Mountain and SpekWork Studio, her projects interrogate technology’s convergence as both labour-saving device and tool of exploitation. With ten years of exhibition history, she’s shown internationally with prominent institutions through Rhizome and the New Museum’s virtual reality platform and the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale with the American Pavilion. Recently, she’s exhibited with the Milan Machinima Festival (2024), Singapore Art Museum (2023), the Art Gallery of Regina (2023), the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie (2022), InterAccess (2021), and Eyelevel Gallery (2021). Her projects have received financial support from the Canadian federal and provincial public arts funding, as well as from institutions including Rhizome, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and OCAD University. Publications and press coverage include features in Hyperallergic, Canadian Art, 032c, the National Post, and Blackflash and Our Times magazines. She lives and works in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, in Mi’kma’ki.