Visual Strolls
seasonal residency
Visual Strolls is a residency space for artists who share an affinity for landscapes and wilderness, inner and outer. Foresta is changing with every season as the real forest does. In cyclical circularity it celebrates changing seasons of nature and of our lives. As snow melts away, as days grow longer, as leaves change colour, as they fly with the wind, as stillness settles in, as warmth returns, as birds cross continents — at the turn of each seasonal moment we invite a different artist to bring a new time of the year to Foresta by creating a portrait of time that later becomes part of the permanent Museum of Seasons.
Winter micro-seasons
In winter ‘Visual Strolls’ at Foresta becomes a space alive with diverse encounters. In the spirit of the entangled pluriversal visions, we invite artists to share seasonal moments they observe and experience across geographies. We are also inspired by the Japanese culture where the understanding of seasons stretches beyond the four times of the year with varying temperature and length of daylight: there are 72 micro-seasons, 72 kō, 72 poetic moments of the year closely observed as things change in the living world around. This winter at Foresta 5 artists from different parts of the globe are sharing their visions of the season.
Winter 2020/2021 Solstice
By
Ava Roth and the bees
Ava and the colony of bees are based in Toronto. Ava is an encaustic painter, embroiderer and mixed media artist, exploring the collision between humans and the natural world. She is developing an inter-species art collaboration with honeybees. The pieces begin in Ava’s studio and are finalized in the bee hives, embedded in natural honeycomb. Ava’s work together with honeybees is a celebration of possibilities for human contact with the natural world and ways of being and doing together.
“These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky, with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows—such things as these are the mother-tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle, inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass today, might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love.”
About Visual Strolls
Visual Strolls is not only an online gallery, an exhibition room, a portrait into the work of the invited artist. It is also a part of our long-term research, understanding arts and creativity as forces that change human states of attention in manifold ways, as forms of cognition and perception, divergent perspectives and poetry of vision, access to intuition and imagination, and empowerment for conscious creation of culture. You can read more about Art into Life research here.
Cover image: Ava Roth and the bees