The SPAO Photo-Synthesis Garden is an incredibly unique outdoor exhibition space. The garden has a custom-built hanging system set up over a large garden bed, pairing the natural world with the created photographic one. The garden introduces students and public audiences to alternative public art displays and materials for photographic or visual art presentation. The garden also introduces concepts of three-dimensional photo-based installations.
The Photo-Synthesis Garden is a partner in the Canadian Tulip Festival, and is part of Ottawa-Gatineau’s Garden Promenade, a showcase of gardens in the region offering unique garden experiences. Special garden attractions, artistic installations, themed events and optional tours occur throughout the season.
EARTHBOUND
The SPAO Centre Gallery proudly presents EARTHBOUND, featuring Ottawa-based artist Barbara Brown. EARTHBOUND imagines the human body in relation to the growth patterns of the earth. Brown’s work serves as a monument to all those who have come before us, with an underlying awareness that death feeds life. As a challenge to the idea of land/body opposition, these earth-informed figures dwell in the space between past and present, life and death, the natural world and our own sense of self-existence beyond our own consciousness. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the work bridges memory with grief, and suggests a path towards the long process of healing. In these unprecedented times, our grief can build and compound, often without release. From fallen soldiers of the past, to our friends, family and neighbours, all of us are part of this cycle; we are bound to the earth; we are nourished by it and finally return to it.
In 2019, SPAO partnered with the Qu'ART - Ottawa Queer Arts Collective to present the exhibition Summer Camp as part of the Qu’ART meta-festival. In conjunction with the exhibition, SPAO also presented London-based artist, writer and designer Paul Harfleet’s The Pansy Project, an important international anti-homophobia initiative. Harfleet has planted almost 300 individual pansies at sites of homophobic abuse around the world. The Ottawa component of the project premiered in SPAO’s Photo-Synthesis Garden on May 10, 2019 in conjunction with Summer Camp.
The SPAO Centre commissioned Deborah Margo to create A Garden for Adele, SPAO’s first iteration of its Photo-Synthesis Garden, which debuted on May 11 as part of the annual Canadiana exhibition in conjunction with the Canadian Tulip Festival and the Garden Promenade. Inspired by the gardens in Little Italy, Margo’s installation features bamboo stick scaffolding that changes configurations and heights as the artist adapts it to the growth of her selected plant palette from May through October.
The garden is dedicated to the first gardener-neighbour that Margo met when she moved to Ottawa and into Little Italy. For Margo, Adele exemplifies the type of gardener who will make a garden in whatever space is available, often combining ornamental and vegetable plants. Adele also gave her many of the first seeds she planted, including those for scarlet runner bean vines, featured prominently in the installation.