Laura Moore: Memories of the Future

Curated by Adam Lauder

January 17- March 15, 2025

Laura Moore, Nintendo Gameboy Tetris, 2021 (front), second-hand clothes, recycled fabric, and 100% cotton. Photo: LFDocumentation

What will observers make of our discarded devices 1,000 years from now? Laura Moore’s timely meditations on the wastefulness of planned electronic obsolescence address an imagined future audience. The first mid-career survey Moore’s practice, Memories of the Future brings together several bodies of work across various media ranging from quilts to sculpture, mosaic, and drawing. These diverse works are united in their exploration of the ephemerality of technologically-mediated memory in an era of digital disposability.

Born in Chatham, Moore has longstanding connections to London and Southwestern Ontario – her early art education was at Fanshawe College and her grandfather was a Chatham stonemason. Moore’s works carry this familial inheritance in their ambition to monumentalize the ordinary in the tradition of anonymous artisans of the past. But the familiar environments memorialized by Moore are resolutely contemporary: the handheld game consoles and mobile phones of a still tangible past, as well as circuit boards salvaged from the curbside.

Foregrounding the paradox that devices created to externalize and preserve memory come into existence already imperilled by disposability, the artist proposes nonlinear models of time and memory. Moore observes that, “somebody can look at something and see the past and the future at the same time.” Such a Janus-faced temporality is evident in, for example, the artists’ use of the ancient medium of mosaic to cast media in an eerie future anterior. Similarly, the coiled outlines of Moore’s hyperrealist drawings of ancient ruins recall her three-dimensional representations of silicon circuit boards. Collectively, Moore’s work challenges us to consider how both our past and future are intricately connected to the devices that have become virtual extensions of our own bodies and personas – until the moment that we discard and replace them in a never-ending cycle. 

Related programming

Opening Reception

Saturday, January 18th from 2:00-4:00pm

Join us in celebrating the opening of Laura Moore’s exhibition Memories of the Future with an opening reception on Saturday, January 18th from 2:00-4:00pm. Artist Laura Moore and Curator Adam Lauder will be in attendance with opening remarks at 2:30. 

Complimentary after hours parking available in select campus lots. https://www.uwo.ca/parking/find/visitor/index.html

Free / Open to the public

Panel Discussion: Alissa Centivany, Laura Moore, and Kirsty Robertson

Thursday, February 27, 5:30 pm at McIntosh Gallery

Please join us for an engaging and enlightening panel discussion with Dr. Alissa Centivany, artist Laura Moore, and Dr. Kirsty Robertson as they address subjects such as memory, technology and waste, planned obsolescence, and the right to repair.

Dr. Alissa Centivany is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University working on technology policy, law, and ethics. She holds a PhD in Information and a JD specializing in intellectual property and technology law.

Dr. Kirsty Robertson is Director of Museum and Curatorial Studies and Director of the Centre for Sustainable Curating in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University.  Dr. Robertson is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair, focusing on research into waste, pollution, the climate crisis, and the development of exhibitions and artworks with low carbon footprints. 

Alize Zorlutuna: Above Borders, Beneath Words

April 5 – May 30, 2025

Curated by Helen Gregory

Alize Zorlutuna, An index of Inheritances, 2025, Variable materials, including El Isi (Anatolian lace), photographs, dried jasmine flowers, rose buds, olive leaves, eucalyptus leaves, rue, ikat silk, copper plate, brass bowl, perfume bottle, jar with honey and almonds, nazar (evil eye) bead.

Above Borders, Beneath Words invites us to consider our relationship to land and water beyond geopolitical borders and national identities. Attending to the specificities of place, each work reflects an engagement with the complexities of belonging— particularly as applied to diasporic communities. The grief of displacement and the resulting loss of knowledge ways is amplified when combined with the grief of living on occupied Indigenous land. Residing on these lands as a settler necessitates a reckoning with the violent histories and ongoing legacies of colonialism, not only in so-called Canada but also globally. Through the juxtaposition of traditional Anatolian material technologies such as textiles and marbling with contemporary media and approaches, this exhibition forges new directions for considering diasporic relationships to place and belonging. The exhibition asks, how might we build embodied relationships with a place over time? How does this relationship-building impact our embodiment and way of moving in the world? How might we balance comfort or kinship found in a new land with the legacy of settler colonialism?

By experimenting with different forms of embodiment, through dance, sensual or erotic engagement with the natural world through touch, Zorlutuna offers propositions for how we might forge new pathways for being in relationship with place, with history, and the future. Arranged around a central installation that encourages conversation, Above Borders, Beneath Words provides a tranquil space within an institutional context where we might engage in generative discourse about how we can live responsibly together on this land.

About the artist:

Alize Zorlutuna is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator whose work explores relationships to land, culture and the more-than-human, while thinking through history, ancestral wisdom and healing. Moving between Tkarón:to and Anatolia (present-day Turkey) both physically and culturally throughout their life has informed Zorlutuna’s practice—making them attentive to spaces of encounter. Zorlutuna enlists poetics and a sensitivity to materials in works that combine traditional Anatolian material practices like textiles, marbling and ceramics, alongside video, printed matter, performance and sculpture. Conjuring earth, air, water, and spirit, Zorlutuna collage mediums, methods, and geographies. The body and its sensorial capacities are central to their work. 

Related Programming:

Opening Reception

Saturday, April 5, 2:00-4:00 p.m.

Remarks at 2:30 p.m.

Complimentary parking available at select campus lots. Learn more (insert link: https://www.uwo.ca/parking/find/visitor/index.html

Free event. Open to the public.

Join us in celebrating the launch of our spring exhibition schedule, featuring two exciting new projects: Alize Zorlutuna: Above Borders, Beneath Words and Holding Patterns: the short view – Recent Acquisitions from McIntosh Gallery.

Leaving the Table, 2019 - ongoing

çay service & guided conversation

Saturday, April 5, 2025. 1:00-2:00 p.m.

Gesturing towards ways of gathering and being with others that are underscored by a sense of mutual responsibility and care, Leaving the Table asks participants to collectively imagine a space other than the table around which we might gather: a space that exists within the boundaries and in relationship to the violent histories of this place; a space that acknowledges the challenge of reconciling the ongoing legacies of these histories with the reality that this place has also been a refuge for many. Leaving the Table asks us to contend with how we came to be here on this land, and what our responsibilities are in being here together.

Join the artist for çay (tea), baklava and a respectful, guided conversation on Saturday April 5, 1:00-2:00 pm. 

This special event will be followed by the opening reception.