Detail from
Lisa Hirmer's
Last Supper from a Seed Vault
Now at the Art Gallery of Mississauga
In Case of Emergency exhibition (June 28 – August 26, 2018)
The Art Gallery of Mississauga has started publicity for its summer exhibitions,
posted on its Facebook:
Summer Exhibitions Opening Reception and Performance
Lisa Hirmer | In Case of Emergency
June 28 – August 26, 2018
Emergencies are commonly understood as sudden events that disrupt lives, spaces, habits, systems, something to prepare for or insure against. But in what feels like a precarious moment in history, there are many circumstances – climate change, social inequality - that may be considered emergencies, acting on larger scales or slower timelines. Artist Lisa Hirmer looks at the idea of emergency and our relationship to it as future event. How does the process of preparing for emergencies act in the present? How can it cause us to rethink priorities and reconsider relationships? How do our understandings of and responses to emergencies change our communities, societies and the world? Visitors are invited to think on and contribute their own perspectives on emergency in this interactive exhibition.
Image: Lisa Hirmer, Last Supper in the Seed Vault, (detail), 2018, photograph. Courtesy of the artist
"Last Supper" could be anything, but it is clearly a reference to "The Last SUpper," from the apocalyptic theme of Hirmer's exhibition
In Case of Emergency.
I've written several articles so far on the the
covert Satanic imagery recently a recurring theme in the gallery's exhibitions.
This upcoming program by Hirmer does not refer directly to Satanic themes, but it sets the stage for a world when anti-God forces can begin to take over, and Satan can fill n the abyss.
The "Last Supper in the Seed Vault" is to prepare us for the post-emergency period when food is gone and we are about to be destroyed.
But it is a blasphemous reference to Christ's Last Supper, the night before he was to be crucified.
For Hirmer, Jesus died and never rose again. That is why she can reference this Biblical event with nihilism and finalty. We are all going to turn to dust and ashes, back to that ground she has made her own spiritual connection:
Doomsayer with a social conscience:
Sowing Seeds of Accord (pdf)
By: Mav Adecergo
The Meliorist
Student Publication of the U. of Lethbridge (Alberta)
Vol 51, Issue 3
November 2017
Lisa Hirmer is sitting on wicker furniture right at that intersection between the Library and UHall. ere are cookies on the table to entice you, and then she hands you a sheet of paper with pictures of di erent plants. Imagine that you're stuck on campus and a disaster strikes, she says, what plants would you want on campus to help you get through that disaster? I choose Kale (for vitamins) , Mushrooms (for protein), and Ginger (for tea and poultices). Lisa tells me that they’ll tally up the plants with the most votes and then plant them all over campus as part of emergency rations in case of disaster. I joke about how it’s part crowdsourced art installation, part doomsday prep exercise. She laughs but immediate-ly agrees. “If you think about doomsday preppers, they hoard stu in the basement, every person for themselves, which is actually not helpful in a disaster. Typically people come together and create systems of mutual aid and self-organization, it’s almost utopian. e only people who buy into the ‘everyone for themselves’ thing are the people who are really invested in the idea of societal breakdown.”
The preparation is actually for the anti-Christ real take-over.
Here is Hirmers's 2017 work:
A Glassiness to the Eyes
Billboard by Lisa Hirmer
September to November, 2017
A Glassiness to the Eyes was created during a residency with the Klondike Institute of Art in Culture in Dawson City and is based on the many stories of animal encounters told to the artist while she was there. In many of these stories the gaze that passes between human and animal plays an important narrative role, the moment when some form of communication passes from one species to another and the story progresses. This visual moment of eyes meeting though seemingly simple, actually belays the deep evolutionary entanglements we have with other animals. The human mind is incredibly adept at noticing eyes looking at it and though we can never be sure of what another creature is thinking, a rapid approximation of what an animal might be thinking could make the difference between surviving an encounter or not. A Glassiness to the Eyes began as a simple experiment to see if Google’s Artificial Neural Network (software being developed to recognize the content of images) could approach the human capacity to quickly notice eyes in a complex visual field. Surprisingly, the sophisticated software, confused by the patterns of leaves and light, saw eyes everywhere. The artist then combined this computer generated vision with the original photograph to create a wallpaper-like composite in which the machine’s reading turns an otherwise banal forest image into an uncanny scene teeming with the gaze of many beings.
[Image and text source: Galleries West]
These evil eyes, open and active, are secretly surveying this "wilderness," Hirmer's spiritual home, for their final gotterdammerung assault.
Behind every modern day doomsayer is a
climate change fanatic:
Rehearsals in Co-sufficiency: Plant Tenders (and other future currencies) is a project about the future—a future that feels ever more uncertain amidst the realities of climate change and political unrest. Things that were once stable seem increasingly less so. It is becoming harder to imagine what the future holds. Disruption feels possible, perhaps even inevitable. And so we are faced with the question of how to prepare for the uncertainty that lies ahead. What actions taken today might help us face the unknowable tomorrow? [Source: University of Lethbridge Art Gallery]
Such is an artist now openly supported by the Art Gallery of Mississauga.
