Carrie Allison

For the past few years, I have developed a body of work focusing on grass, and other monocultures such as wheat, barley, and oats, that have been used as colonial space-taking tools. These crops are, historically and presently, strategically placed to guide movement, elevate status, signal respectable use of land, and point to morality, purity and cleanliness. The experience of making these extremely laborious sculptures has inspired me to think deeply about how land is used in North America and how it’s created moral responsibilities and reinforced them through settler colonial laws and by-laws. The works shown at FOFA Gallery are inspired by my childhood growing up in cities and suburbs, the parcelling of my relatives and ancestors' prairie territory that have turned into spaces of western crop production, and the questioning of colonial space-making strategies. These works depict how colonial policy promotes the destruction of land and trees (old growth forests on the west coast, old growth pines being decimated in the east, most recently the green belt in Ontario, OKA) for individual, state, and corporate prot. As one of the largest irrigated crops on menistik (the nêhiawêwin word for North, Central, and South America), lawns tell the contradictory and colonial stories of this land - by consuming an abundance of resources, and signifying wealth, the nuclear family, etiquette, and property management. Monoculture crops share stories of the altered landscapes and they are a farce for “productivity”. My small plots of sculptural grass reclaim land and space while conceptualizing concepts and critiques of labour which are often threaded into my work, physically, conceptually, or critically. Though the beadings are playful and ironic in materiality and subject matter, they are products of a laborious and at times painful process, where an enormous amount of hours are spent beading tiny strains of grass into plot patches.