Krista-Leigh Davis is a visual artist working in video, animation, and sculpture, living between Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in territory (Dawson City, Yukon) and K’jipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia). Her practice is a space where dirt, bones, and jars of microscopic algal communities meet costumes, wigs, and jars of glass glitter. Where queerness, the Wild, and relationships in the natural world guide artistic explorations. In this space, Davis hopes to uncover creative, even fantastical strategies to shift human and non-human relationships towards a more ecologically just world.
Davis’ work has been exhibited at festivals and galleries internationally, including a recent solo show The Icehouse Architect at The Blue Building, in Halifax, NS. She has been a contributor-participant with ecological projects such as Drylab 2023, Nibi Walks led by Sharon M Day, and Stories for the Arctic Refuge. Before turning her focus to her solo practice in 2017, Davis co-founded the OUTeast Queer Film Festival in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and created queer cabaret-style music/video/comedy synthetic-haired mash-up shows with a group of artists and musicians at the Company House. She is currently working on a poetry-animation collaboration with a young poet, Samanda Ritch.
Throughout August, and during Capital Pride, Davis' piece, Adaptations for Capitalist Ruins, will be featured on the Kipnes Lantern. We spoke with Krista-Leigh about her approach to creating this work, the role of queerness and the natural world in her artistic explorations, and the message she hopes to leave with the public.
What was your approach to creating Adaptations for Capitalist Ruins for the digital stage, and how would you describe the work?
This work is adapted from an experimental video about a toxic, abandoned mine in Yukon, Canada, and a host of campy creatures who have figured out strategies to care for this damaged land. For the Lantern, I reimagined the story of one group of these creatures—The Extremophiles.
To get science-y about it, extremophiles are microorganisms who thrive in environments deemed inhospitable for humans, such as extreme temperatures, salinity, or acidity. Some extremophiles actually have the ability to clean up polluted areas by breaking down oil spills, or by either bioaccumulating heavy metals or neutralizing heavy metal toxicity. In Adaptations for Capitalist Ruins, I’ve borrowed from this premise to imagine a fictional scenario where humans learn from these resilient microbes.
How does queerness, the Wild and relationships in the natural world guide your artistic explorations – generally, and in relation to this specific work?
The ecological issues I work with—climate change, the extraction economy, the environmental impacts of capitalist colonial systems—they’re huge, they’re overwhelming. We are asked to take action, but they’re happening at such a different scale than our individual bodies, so it can feel paralyzing. In my work, I’m looking for ways to disarm the overwhelm, to ground us in our bodies so we can imagine new, more ecologically just futures. If we can’t imagine new futures, how will we figure a way out of the mess we’re in?
This is where queerness, the Wild, and relationships in the natural world come in. For me, they have been really powerful tools for unbuilding assumptions I inherited from our profit-driven, heteronormative, Western culture. Queerness has taught me the value of thinking at the margins (outside of convention is a space of possibility!), the Wild is a place outside of the rules and norms of culture, and understanding myself as a series of interconnected relationships with creatures and land around me has made it impossible to not feel responsible for these connections.
For example, in Adaptations for Capitalist Ruins, the Scientists enter into a collaborative relationship with the Extremophiles, who request the Scientists depart from convention and begin expressing their research in poetry. This shift in frame opens up ways to understand the non-human worlds as equal collaborators rather than subjects in a study, to see what new perspectives we may find if we break free from rigid, siloed ways of thinking.
The visual elements of the work are paired with written content. What is the message you want the public to be left with?
I think of this work more as a proposition than as having a message because messages can feel one-sided, heavy-handed, and prescriptive. A proposition is collaborative—an offering to the viewer to take an idea and engage with it in their own way.
Fluorescent extremophilic microbes dancing to heal damaged land? That is just some campy fabulism to encourage thinking outside the box. Ultimately, the proposition in the work is this: We humans and our resource extraction practices have left behind damaged, toxic land. What can we learn from other-than-human creatures about how to care for these spaces? How may we adapt our strategies, culturally, politically, and as individuals, to be better stewards of the land?
How does it feel to see your work shining on the Kipnes Lantern at the NAC in the heart of Ottawa during Pride Month and Capital Pride?
As a queer artist, this is quite the honour! I was able to come to Ottawa to catch it on the Lantern at the end of June, and seeing it in person was definitely cool. I loved how the bright colours create a glow on the building and pavement at night. But on a socio-political level, I’m excited that the NAC has chosen to bring a work about environmental stewardship to Pride. This discussion is often missing from our celebrations, and there are some very important connections between queerness and ecological justice. Namely, the systems and beliefs that create oppressive and dangerous circumstances for queer and trans people are the same ones that have allowed us to live in ways that damage our earth. I mean our colonial, Capitalist systems that we—as a culture, a country—can’t seem to imagine a way out of. I do think we can look to queer communities for some help with this!
For this work, I thought a lot about Queer Tactics—strategies of resistance and celebration that queer communities have used to push back against or find freedom from oppression. Strategies like camp, building chosen families, transformation, and adaptation have helped our 2SLGBTQIA+ communities thrive and imagine more liveable futures for ourselves. Let’s see what they can do for the earth.
See more of Krista-Leigh's work on her website or on Instagram .
On the Kipnes Lantern, Adaptations for Capitalist Ruins by queer artist Krista-Leigh Davis proposes a discussion about discovering creative, playful tactics to transform damaged landscapes into livable spaces.
