L’air est lourd, a group exhibition organized by Cassandra Lesage Fongué, approaches the storm not as a distant natural phenomenon, but as an immersive system — slow, certain, already at work. In the age of the Anthropocene that we now inhabit, L’air est lourd invites us to consider the storm as a potent metaphor for the climatic transformations that envelop us. The air is heavy: the storm has not yet broken; it is not yet raining. And yet, everything is charged — vibrating with anticipation. We know that the storm is underway — we had forecasted it. After all, we have created not only the tools of meteorological prediction, but also the mechanisms that engendered it.
As every system carries within it the seed of its own accident, climate change in our age is an invention of the Anthropocene, just as the shipwreck is that of the ship. We are the storm as much as we inhabit it.
The exhibition invites reflection on the growing opacity of the world, on the tangled binaries between those who destroy and those who are destroyed, and on how art can dwell within this uncertainty — giving it form, embodying it, making perceptible the heaviness of the air.
The exhibition features works by Lisa Hirmer, Laura Demers, Hala Alsalman, and Katherine Takpannie. Together, they explore the nature of artificial clouds, the atmosphere shaped by human hubris, the slow transformations, and the minute signs of atmospheric change.
The works also question how meteorological precarity manifests through the emission and unfolding of warning signals, while imagining post-disaster worlds where myth and prediction blur, weaving cyclical forms of archaeology.
This project is presented in partnership with the Ontario Association of Visual Artists (BRAVO) and Art Windsor-Essex. It is supported by the Ontario Arts Council.
