Installation view of PLASMA by Peter von Tiesenhausen. All works courtesy of the artist. Photo by Blaine Campbell.
PLASMA | PETER VON TIESENHAUSEN
09 JULY 2022 - 04 SEPTEMBER 2022
Over the course of Peter von Tiesenhausen’s career as an artist, natural materials and renewable processes have remained core to his work. Never one to waste a good piece of fallen poplar or scrap steel, von Tiesenhausen is known for repurposing the discards of past projects, industrial equipment, and the natural waste near his home community of Demmitt, Alberta. In von Tiesenhausen’s continuing considerations of changing states of matter, connected life cycles, and the passing of time, plasma became a way to think about the exchanges between matter, energy, and life.
Plasma is superheated matter. Comprising 99% of the visible universe, plasma glows in the form of stars, nebulas, and the aurora borealis. Plasma cracks across the sky in the form of lightning, it lights our homes, and is emitted from nuclear detonations. Creating his steel sculptures from a solar-powered plasma cutter, von Tiesenhausen transforms the plasma of the sun into the electrical current powering his plasma cutter.
Derived from the Ancient Greek word πλάσσω (plássō) meaning, “to shape”, plasma conjures the possibilities of creation through plastic mediums. Throughout the exhibition, von Tiesenhausen wields the constructive and destructive possibilities of heat, combustion, and light.
Through the fiery process of carbonization, organic matter is reduced to a purely carbon and highly-fragile version of itself. The carbonized sculptures freeze evidence of a changing and deteriorating ecosystem through destruction. Sections of carbonized poplar bark resemble the pages of a charred book, asking to be read as pages of passing time. Deceased bees in their hives are also transfixed through this process. Much like the bee population itself, these ebony-like sculptures are so incredibly fragile that a single disturbance could destroy them.
von Tiesenhausen’s perspective on the human experience reflects an indescribable connection between art, the quantum perspective, and the biosphere. His art is grounded in the individual experience of the layers of time, suspended between nothingness and eternity in our grasp of the human condition.
Curated by Ania Sleczkowska and Adam Whitford
Peter von Tiesenhausen is a settler artist based in rural Treaty 8 territory, in the community of Demmitt, AB. von Tiesenhausen's long-standing multidisciplinary practice staunchly eludes categorization; land art, community-building, steel sculpture, environmental activism, bronze-casting, and wild blueberry propagation equally contribute to a complex synergy: a life lived as art.
Emerging in resonance with the natural cycles of the land he stewards and lives on, von Tiesenhausen's work contains an elemental urgency—a capacity to demonstrate momentary, precise unities between celestial mechanics and rural common sense: states in which every droplet of water reflects the sun.
This exhibition was made possible with funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the City of Lethbridge.