Tag: Fungi

Mushrooms and Contemporary Art

zeger-thorenspaine-fungusfieldpaintingM&E - Amanita 2

Hello everyone,

my name is Dario Ré and I am an artist, father, student and mushroom enthusiast living in Montréal. I’m entering my second year of an M.A. in Art History at Concordia University and am writing a thesis on mushrooms and relational art. I’m specifically interested in the notion of symbiosis and the metaphors that exists between the mycorrhizal relationships in forest ecology and the relational/social/community element of contemporary art practices.

I am delighted to have been invited by Diane to join and help facilitate the mushroom foray on October 7th and am looking forward to meeting all of you. I can’t think of a better way to get to know each other than to spend an afternoon looking for mushrooms. I will bring some extra field guides to cross-reference our findings and will take some time to share an element of my research while we’re in the field.

This morning I published the beginning of a web project called Mushroom Resource that I hope to develop as a visual supplement to my research. You will find a collection of artworks that engage with mushrooms in one way or another. They are organized by taxonomic family (ex. Amanitaceae). So please browse the images and if there are specific projects that strike your interest shoot me a line and I’ll be sure to touch on those during our time together. Enjoy!

See you next week!

Terrestrial / Celestial – Diane Borsato

terrestrial1   terrestrial13

Terrestrial/ Celestial

Event/ photographs

Toronto and Vancouver region, 2009-2010

“I coordinated an exchange of terrestrial knowledge for celestial knowledge between amateur mycologists and astronomers. First the mushroomers hosted the astronomers on an afternoon foray to collect and identify fungus species. In the evening, the astronomers hosted the mushroomers to look through telescopes at the sun, stars, planets, and satellites. The exchange took place first at a personal scale in Toronto in 2009, and then as a major event in Maple Ridge BC, with the participation of the Vancouver Mycological Society and the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (Vancouver Centre) in May 2010.

Mycology is visceral, it relies on all our immediate and proximal senses, and it is concerned with the fecund and ephemeral. It exists in a time scale of seasons, and of hours, as things can decay and dissolve before you even empty your basket. The practice of astronomy requires amazing feats of conceptualization and imagination. It’s concerned with the elemental and the other worldly, and things exist at distances, in numbers, and in time scales that exceed comprehension. Both practices are much assisted by a range of technical devices from microscopes to telescopes, and by enthusiastic teachers who can animate everything from tiny spores to a speck of distant light.”

www.dianeborsato.net