Prof. D’arcy Wilson

Any idea where North America’s first public zoo was established? Prof. D’Arcy Wilson does. Her research regarding Western culture’s colonial understanding of nature, led her to create The Memorialist, which highlights the little known story of North America’s first public zoo dedicated to the study of nature. Andrew Downs’ Zoological Gardens opened in 1847, in the outskirts of the young settler city of Halifax.

Prof. Wilson’s project uncovers little known information about the zoo and attempts to reconstruct the grounds in a diorama, while also presenting the opening of the zoo as another example of misguided and harmful colonial interactions with the natural world.

"I have created an interdisciplinary visual art installation that acts not only as a critique of the zoological gardens, but also as a memorial to a lost connection between settler culture and nature," said Prof. Wilson.

This project has been presented in exhibitions at the Owens Art Gallery at Mount Allison University (2016), and at Dalhousie University Art Gallery (2019), and the work continues to evolve. In a public performance, she adopts the persona of "The Memorialist" in order to lecture about the zoo, combining fact with whimsical drawings and photographs in a media intensive slide show. In October 2019, this work will be presented at the Art Gallery of Alberta, for the Sobey Art Award Exhibition, in which Prof. Wilson is the 2019 shortlisted artist representing the region of Atlantic Canada. The Memorialist was made possible with support from the Canada Council for the Arts, Centre for Art Tapes (in Halifax, NS), Arts NS, and an Artistic Creative Grant from Memorial University.

Prof. Wilson’s work has taken her abroad as well – in June 2017, she participated in the Art/Nature conference at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (Contemporary Art in Natural History Museum) in Germany.

Outside of her visual art practice, Prof. Wilson has founded the Saltbox Festival of Contemporary Art, bringing leading performance artists from across Canada to Grenfell Campus, curating and orchestrating the festival in collaboration with the Grenfell Campus Art Gallery. The festival has become a notable event in the Canadian art world, happening within Grenfell’s Fine Arts Building – creating work, volunteering, networking and viewing opportunities for Grenfell’s Fine Arts students and the community of Corner Brook.