kristina fiedrich

In residence: 2019

The Coppermoss Residency has been influential in facilitating a new body of work that explores indifference as a response to the ontogenesis and certitude of global environmental degradation. Apathy, as a physical and psychological response to grief or state of indifference, has become the central emotive quality I have been considering in creating this new work.

An apathetic response to climate change and global environmental futures can be understood as grieving the loss of nature and anthropocentric ideologies, fantasies of technological salvation or escapism, and nostalgia for perceived better times. The location of the residency lent well to themes of isolation, off-grid living and escapist fantasies. Intersecting human, nature and technology, the new work draws from pop-culture, environmental and historical references, as well as foraged debris to express the precarity of our environment, both natural and constructed.

A practicing artist and scholar, Fiedrich holds an undergraduate degree is studio art from Thompson Rivers University (2005), an MAA in visual arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2012) and an MA in Comparative Media Arts from Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts (2015). Fiedrich’s studio practice focuses on the medium of drawing, in its various modalities and materialities. Her work explores the body, its failures and adaptabilities, and the impact of technologies on physical and embodied representations. In 2011, Fiedrich was awarded the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Graduate Student Award for her thesis titled The Fashionable Prosthetic: investigating the visibility and new fashion of prosthetic research, investigating the relationship between technological advancements of prostheses and the emergence of prosthetics to transform the body. In 2014, she received a SSHRC Graduate Scholarship for her thesis The Glut of Faciality: face, mask and identity in contemporary surveillance culture. Fiedrich has exhibited in Canada and the USA, was named Gallery 295’s Emerging Curator in 2016, and has been published in Peripheral Review and Kapsula Magazine. Alongside her art practice, Fiedrich is the Coordinator of Design + Media at Emily Carr University of Art + Design Continuing Studies Department.