Modern Art Madness Week, Day 3: Eco-awareness and Conquering Trashworld in Aurora Robson’s “The Great Indoors”.

We hear this catch all term, this romantic yet tragicomic coinage of late, that denotes this odd intersection between explicitly Right Wing observations about the nature of social and cultural decay, and the ecological decay that seems to work parallel to each other in our very own end of days. This term I am referring to is “TRASHWORLD”; We live in trash, we produce trash, our culture is trash, our post-industrial society is trash, the third world rivers filled with trash, we all act trashy, the micro-plastics are everywhere, they are in our veins, in our food, in our water, right now they are lowering your T levels….or something like that.

Installation art gets a bad rap (and a lot of the times, for good reason) as being anti-art, or art for cathedral ideologues, art for people “who cannot actually do art” etc. And despite this, you manage to find some real gems that are filled with meaning, that are “activist” still, but in all the right ways. Not some stale ans lazy activism present in any of the bloviated walking contemporary art-term dictionaries that are routinely handed the Turner prize (this year, not a single painter got nominated). Sometimes installation art serves a purpose, while being highly beautiful in the aesthetic sense, even if that aesthetic beauty fills a whole room, and is an actual feat of intellectual and artistic creation. This is what led me to profiling the Magnum Opus of Toronto-based Eco-minded artist Aurora Robson.