Dyan Marie’s Eden Archive images present a close-looking at seeds that she has harvested from walks along Toronto railway lines, city lane-ways, industrial grey-lands, hydro-corridors and as offered in private front yards, parks and community spaces. The works explore innate shapes and forms that enable the methods for plants to migrate along urban corridors unintentionally opened to light. The images, with shaped edges referencing architecture and containment forms, explore the idea of seeds as end products, dormant yet charged with futurity, and their nature as a shared means for the beginnings of life in plants, insects, animals and people.
Over the past 25 years Dyan Marie has made art rooted in how we live in cities. The works engage local social, civic and environment situations and include reference to urban traumas such as toxic waste, murder, suicide, garbage, disappearing trees and green public space. The projects have been enacted by engaged walking projects, destinations and events. Works related to these various projects have been exhibited in galleries and institutions and research has been allied to other urban projects elsewhere via web-based activity. International actions include projects held in Japan in the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami and various activity-based lectures and poetry readings in Toronto, Winnipeg and Montreal.
In tandem, and in reaction to this public agency, she has also explored opposite terrain with works engaged in a formal questioning of how things stand up, how lines cross, how beginnings form, how we experience age and time and how we realize ourselves as now in the midst of climate change. She has created performances about the body breathing in its surroundings and breathing out images of transmissions, extensions and armatures. Here series of text-based images have proposed means to imagine a future.
Dyan Marie’s work include sculpture, text, images and place-making through projects of public art, curating, walking systems, publications, banner projects, community initiatives, festivals and poetry events. A founder of C Magazine, Cold City Gallery, DIG IN, Walk Here, Dupont Projects, BIG: Bloor Improvement Group and the BIG On Bloor Festival. Her organization How We Live In Cities responds to climate change and population shift with art and ecology projects. Dyan is the recipient of a Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal, the Canadian Urban Institute’s City Soul, a Davenport Environment recipient and 2017 Kathy Acker Award among other art, ecology and community building honours. dyanmarie.com civicstudies.ca
