AGOG presents: Prey to Gather by Shasta McCoy

 Shasta’s fiber exhibition, OtherwOOld was featured at the Centre 64’s gallery in Kimberley, BC in 2023. In 2021 she exhibited Woolscape Architecture and Natur[ALT]erations the Art Gallery of Golden. In 2016, she received a grant from the Columbia Basin Trust and the Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance to publish her digital art book The Alphabet Mandalas. Her 2012 performance and ecological collaborations with Jeanette Angel include Reduzcamos and the Waterways Moses Project.  In her landscape architecture practice, she designs green infrastructure and public spaces that prioritize resilience, and equity, interweaving communities with natural systems.

Artist Statement

The Prey to Gather exhibit opens a dialogue about feminine wisdom, body autonomy, sacrifice and consent from the point of view of prey animals through immersive textural experiences. Herds rely on generational knowledge of their ancestors to learn the routes through the land that are abundant and nourishing. The mythos of many pre-christian/pre-colonial traditions reveal many deities with distinct attributes of prey, i.e. hooves, horns and antlers, the messages of whom have been often misrepresented or silenced by monotheism. This silencing and demonization, I argue, is intertwined with resistance to female divinity, worth, wisdom, autonomy and underpins the ruthlessness inherent in colonization. I am an immigrant and newcomer to Canada recognizing a ruthlessness manifesting in the place of my birth, a worldview that is profoundly threatened by women and others who claim the right of body autonomy. Collectively, as we face the hungry gaze of a predator driven to conquer and violate, Prey To Gather dares us to be radiant, sensual and to stomp our defiant hooves and not consent.

These goaty, bovine, and ungulate spirits provoke you here to seek the ways of wise and gentle ancestors, the deertrods and rocky precipices, to claim the abundance that emerges from the balance of the feminine and masculine energy. The tattered threads of our collective connection to the earth-based traditions are waiting for us to pick them up and reweave our communities back into harmony with land and water. I find profound hope in the stories that all peoples once spoke the language of the animals. In my process of sculpting wool creatures, I meditate upon my animal relations and am ever amazed and fascinated at how each animal emerges clear from a disorderly entanglement of fibers: entropy as the foundation of order. 

Woolscapes is a collection of abstract felting, weaving, and macrame presenting themselves as landforms with interwoven systems and networks. Each woolscape results from my intimate conversation with the materials… twists, knots, tangles and plots encoding narrative. The found objects in the woolscapes are held in tension affording these objects an elevated position, often with precarious attachments. This dance with fragility echoes the theme of prey and vulnerability while flirting with the dynamic nature of balance. The stories entangled in these works speak not only to the viewer, but also to one another. You are invited to linger for a while, in the hope that you overhear what Ymir whispers to Urd.