Monuments Fade, but Land Lasts Forever
At the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, two exhibitions reframe Earthworks as care and connection in a time of climate crisis.
BUSH Gallery (Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Peter Morin, Tania Willard) + kids, family, the land and dogs, “Plants as[are] Monuments”, 2021. Light sensitive emulsion on tipi canvas. Produced at BUSH Gallery rezidency in Secwepemcúl̓ecw. Photo by Jean-Michael Seminaro, MOMENTA 2021.
When you hear the term “earthwork,” what comes to mind? If you’re an art history buff, you’ll think of the land art movement that began in the United States in the late 1960s, which saw artists such as Robert Smithson carve Spiral Jetty into Utah’s Great Salt Lake in 1970, Nancy Holt install her Sun Tunnels to Utah’s Great Basin Desert in 1976, and Walter De Maria plant his The Lightning Field in New Mexico in 1977, the same year James Turrell started Roden Crater in Arizona.
While these interventions into the landscape freed sculpture from the confines of the gallery, the canon continues to largely enshrine white, settler artists and celebrate macho, colonial characteristics such as scale, endurance, and authorship. The works also configure nature as a blank canvas—also known as terra nullius—containing material belonging to no one and thus ripe for being moved around, manipulated, and mastered.
Solveig Qu Suess, film still of Holding Rivers, Becoming Mountains. Video, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
This framing obscures Indigenous presence and stewardship, because of course the landscape has never been unoccupied or untouched. It has rather been deliberately shaped and sustained over generations. From September 4 to December 20, two group exhibitions at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto seek to redress this oversight, reclaim the word “earthwork,” and redefine land art as a form of relationship and responsibility with the seas, skies, and soil surrounding us.
Executive director Barbara Fischer describes Earthwork (curated by Mikinaak Migwans, curator of Indigenous contemporary art and assistant professor of art history at U of T) as emphasizing care for the land, while Dwelling Under Distant Suns (curated by master of visual studies in curatorial studies candidate Yantong Li) contends with visually representing the scale of human-led change to the environment.
Solveig Qu Suess, film still of Holding Rivers, Becoming Mountains. Video, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
Michael Belmore, drift, 2025. Steel, wood, 2.43 m x 9 m x 4.5 m. Photo courtesy of the artist.
At Earthwork’s centre are Art Hunter’s photographs and videos documenting land stewardship at Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung Historical Centre in northwestern Ontario, an important site of early human habitation and ceremonial burial. Michael Belmore adds a snow fence sculpture that resists the gallery calendar, instead adhering to the changing of seasons (it runs from November 2025 through March 2026). Lisa Myers’s sound piece invites visitors to slow down, walk and listen. Works by Bush Gallery (Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Peter Morin, and Tania Willard), Alex Jacobs-Blum, Faye HeavyShield, Mike MacDonald, Edward Poitras, and Protect the Tract extend the dialogue.
The genesis of Li’s exhibition, Dwelling Under Distant Suns, came from a recent trip he took home to Yunnan, China, where he saw the usually snow-covered peaks of Cangshan Mountain stripped bare—a stark image of climate catastrophe. He includes many film works in his show, contending with another crisis afflicting society: the scarcity of prolonged attention. Documentary filmmaker Solveig Qu Suess captures the Mekong River gone rogue, and Kent Chan imagines a fictional future where the whole globe goes tropical. It might be uncomfortable sitting with the subject matter in some of the works—Alvin Luong’s Cyanide Debt, 2025, restages a mass poisoning in Bangkok—but you’ll learn and feel a lot more than you will by spending the same amount of time scrolling through mind-mollifying TikToks.
Faye HeavyShield, Clan (performance documentation), 2019. Courtesy of Blaine Campbell.
Each exhibition clarifies the mission of the other and invites viewers in to use art as a method of learning to interact with the land—to listen, look, sit down, take it all in, and let a feeling of responsibility take root.
