The Archaic Torso II (2018)
TYLER
MUZZIN
Collateral (2022)
vinyl, the plumb bar, Toronto ON
Photograph: Alison Postma
Installation: Nadine Maher
Collateral is a photographic mural depicting a sheet of fly paper used by a private land owner in the summer of 2021 to deter invasive Lymantria dispar dispar caterpillars from ascending an adult maple tree. An infestation of LDD moths causes considerable damage to hardwood trees, as each specimen consumes up to 1000 square centimetres of foliage in its larval (caterpillar) phase.
As you can see, there are no caterpillars on the fly tape, illustrating the potential consequences of shoot-from-the-hip ecology.
Three Sisters (2022)
digital photograph
1. Home Depot
2. Canadian Tire
3. No Frills
4. Costco
A play on the prevalence of naming groups of mountains "Three Sisters"—there’s a group in Canmore, Alberta, a group in Elk Valley, BC, and a group in the Oregon Cascades, to name a few. To intensify the theatricality of this naming process, I imply in this work that Three Sisters is a reference to the Three Fates of Greek mythology: Clotho (the Spinner), Lachesis (the Allotter), and Atropos (the Inflexible). I also added a fourth image to point to the arbitrariness of naming geographic landmarks.
A Drawing of Plan of an Idea (2022)
wood burning on black walnut
Working through a range of media, almost like a palimpsest of thought, only to arrive at a layered representation of a dream without ever achieving the end goal itself.
The Town Musicians of Bremen (and Elsewhere) (2021)
digital composite photographs, Series of 13
The Town Musicians of Bremen
from The Brothers Grimm
Once upon a time, there were four farmyard animals—a donkey, a dog, a cat, and a rooster, who realized in their old age that they could no longer perform their farmyard duties and would soon be put to death by their owner. So they decided to leave the farm and travel to the city of Bremen where they would make a living as town musicians. One night on their way to Bremen, a raging storm forced them to seek shelter in a small cottage in the forest. As they approached the cottage, they noticed that it was inhabited by three robbers who were sitting down to a feast of spoils in front of a cozy fire. Working together, the animals climbed upon each others’ backs and crashed through the window, terrifying the robbers and sending them running into the woods. Believing the intruder to be a horrible witch, the robbers abandoned the cottage where the animals decided to take up residence and lived happily and peacefully until the end of their days.
The Battlements of Northern Commerce (2021)
digital composite photographs
The Battlements of Northern Commerce, uses hypothetical reflective surfaces placed on billboards to comment on the ubiquity of car-culture and the carefully regulated, yet highly public space of the Canadian highway. This series addresses the shoulders, ditches, and untravelled spaces that become competitive territory for marketing and solicitation. The lack of a cohesive system for managing these spaces, however, leaves many abandoned and derelict structures on the side of the road.
As structures, these signs recall abandoned battlements and fortifications that may have been constructed with a sense of urgency. Over time, many of the signs have fallen into disrepair. The space they occupy along the highway is contentious--municipally-maintained, publicly-travelled, privately-advertised, colonially-acquired land. As advertisements, the signs suggest an embedding of commerce and consumerism into the land itself.
The Great Dark Wonder (2019)
Burlington Public Art, Cobalt Connects
Using cellphones, visitors to Burloak Waterfront Park can listen in on a dialogue between two fictional ornithologists who are eternally confined to the research station by unknown forces. Muzzin’s installation explores ideas of the “Natural” through the lens of ecocriticism. The installation focuses on the representation of physical environments and the ways in which these environments are depicted and, in turn, consumed by mass culture.
- Burlington Public Art
Thanks to Foris Signs Inc.
Sentinel (2019)
Of Surroundings
Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, AB
Curated by Kristy Trinier and Kylie Fineday
Inkjet on Aluminum Composite Material, 11" x 17"
24 of 50
Sentinel is an ongoing series of light sources that struggle to compete with the surrounding darkness of the Alberta prairie. On my night walks, I began to view these lights as sentry patrol, echoing Northrop Frye’s theme of “garrison mentality,” a trend in Canadian Literature when characters build metaphorical walls against the outside world. This mentality derives from the part of the settler imagination that feels threatened by the vast emptiness of the Canadian landscape. Within city limits, the street lights are like nodes in a vector, slowly expanding the city’s boundary of visibility with every new development. As a cultural prosthetic, the electricity artificially extends our vision well beyond “natural” diurnal hours, subjecting some locations to perpetual brightness.
Individually, the scenes may appear banal, but collectively they become highly theatrical and incidentally organized with implied drama.
Chorus (2018)
THIRD SHIFT, Saint John, NB
HD Video, 30'00", four channel surround sound audio
Chorus developed out of research on the Pincher Creek wind farms in Southern Alberta. The incentive for renewable power has fostered an ongoing debate about turbine efficiency, structural longevity, energy storage, and wildlife safety. This video expands on normative scales of human time and considers alternative scales – from animal time, to geologic time.
The video is composed of thirty stationary shots of turbines slowed to one frame per second. The audio track is a recording of an amplified kitchen clock
#ifatreefallsintheforest (2019)
Powerpoint Presentation
88 slides, 792 images, 9 minutes
A slideshow containing every instagram post with the hashtag #ifatreefallsintheforest (up to January 2019). With slide transitions, the presentation scrolls upward, imitating the instagram format for a duration of 9-minutes. The collection of nearly 800 images illustrates many interpretations of the philosophical thought experiment "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" Some interpretations include self-portraits at the gym, food and drink documentation, and inspirational quotes, but most commonly the photos include a tree that has fallen in a forest.
My intent is to bring together this famous proposition with the idea of social media self-representation and the validation ideology of the slightly more colloquial "pics or it didn't happen."