Community Display: SmART Communications; Creative Ecologies with Garvin Chinnia

This community display is an outcome from the Creative Ecologies Workshop, sponsored by the SMArt Communications initiative at the University of Windsor. The workshop invited students and members of the community to explore how drawing can build new relationships with local ecosystems and ecological interactions.  Participants created circular drawings of subjects found on the gallery’s Green Roof Terrace using handheld microscopes. Through observational drawing, participants looked at the inherent fragility and subjectivity of our local ecology as it relates to the degrees of change in species abundance, composition, and environmental disturbances.

Garvin Chinnia is a larval Bioartist of mixed Ukrainian and Trinidadian ancestry. His practice attempts to engage creatively with ecologies through the various mediums of drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation. Through the interfaces of terraria, aquaria, gardening, and an insatiable need to collect samples biological that he finds interesting, he seeks to effect change within a dynamic biosphere, under anthropogenic pressures, struggling to exist and salvage what remains and intensely curious of what is to come. He wishes to plant the seeds of a paradigm shift that will leave our species more fully aware of, integrated with, and responsible to its ecosystem.

Drawer, Painter, Gardener, Bioartist, Garvin seeks to blend the blend the knowledges of his diverse background into a sustainable and growable alloy for an unknown future. He wishes to abandon the path that generations of capitalism, exploitation, imperialism and slavery our species holds to. In so doing, he wishes to if not start a garden in space, then to inspire that dream in others.