Biophilia | Nanaimo Art Gallery

Biophilia is a touring exhibition from Musee d’art de Joliette that asks what it means to be connected with the natural world as it rapidly changes around us. Through painting, sculpture, installation, and video, artists in Biophilia examine the desires and contradictions that surround human relationships with nature.

Biophilia means “love of nature.” It is the innate human desire to be in touch with living things and to bond with nature. This term sets the tone for the exhibition and encourages respect and kindness towards all forms of life—microscopic organisms, plants, and animals—and every element of the environment. It contrasts the colonial perspective of a nourishing Mother Earth—whose resources are there to exploit—with worldviews that know the Earth as an entity to unite with, care for, and love, but not possess.

The accelerating effects of climate change force us to question our individual and collective behaviour, and reflect on how we exist as part of the world. This is precisely what the works in this Biophilia invite us to do. How do we reconcile the quest for ever-increasing physical and material comforts, with the restraint that is necessary? How can we untangle the complexities of land and resource exploitation that many societies still rely on? This exhibition addresses the limits of regeneration and fertility, but also the intrinsic strength of living beings and their transformative capabilities.

Biophilia proposes a spiritual and sensual communion with nature that goes well beyond our gaze; it’s a union with our entire being. It means sensing, through our bodies, the substances that shape our environments, and understanding ourselves as part of a whole—that we are nature.