Still Time, Beaver Galleries, Canberra
Alexander Boynes
3rd – 19th November 2022
Still Time is a continuation of the artist’s investigation into living with climate change in Australia. It sheds light on the Black Summer Fires of 2019-2020, a catastrophe quickly overshadowed by the constraints upon human life caused by COVID-19. The pandemic shut us indoors and kept us locked away from confronting the fires’ ravaging effects.
While Australia has since experienced unusually wet summers during El Niña, the Northern hemisphere is now on fire, with record temperatures and wildfires in regions unaccustomed to such travesty. Indigenous Australia has a well-recorded history of managing bushfires through firestick farming and cool burning, but in lands where these practices were never performed, new life struggles to emerge from the ashes.
As caretakers of the land, it is our responsibility to once again harness such practices and restore nature’s balance. Though living in the Anthropocene and coping with the effects of climate change might seem like an impossible task, we must nurture hope. There is still time.
Review: Alexander Boynes' Still Time at Beaver Galleries is disturbing by Sasha Grishin for The Canberra Times
