Connie Chappel

2 May - 28 June, 2025

PLATFORM Centre for Photographic & Digital Arts, Winnipeg, MB

Curated by Camilo Londoño Hernández

The show plays on how photographic processes evoke a poetic paradox: to see, we must accept blindness. In other words, the ability to (not) see goes beyond looking and visual tools.

Darkrooms must cut the light off to work out and reveal what light was captured in the past. As a result, photos are built from an extension of our senses. Like an explosion, this camouflage crosses the whole photographic performance. Light needs darkness to do its work.

Images point out that intimate gesture of concealment when the object and the subject decide to look over and beyond the eyes, and see with the whole body.

Camilo Londoño Hernández, curator, text excerpts from exhibition brochure.

12 September - 14 November, 2025

Galerie Buhler Gallery, Hôpital St-Boniface Hospital, Winnipeg

Curated by hannah g

Tending the Wild does not adhere to a manicured definition of what a garden or exhibition is. Many artists also tend the wild and the work contained in this exhibition touches on nature and healing, subversion, pleasure, fecundity, reciprocity, as well as history, and politics. It invites viewers to think about what it means to cultivate, to prepare, use or enjoy.

Neither a garden or an art practice are still; growth prompts expansion and retreat. They are places of work, reward, disappointment, and delight and provide the ingredients of knowledge, sustenance, and gifts. Artmaking and gardening are acts of intensification—colour, form, and context are heightened, visions are realised. Complex ideas and processes are revealed in sometimes deceptively beautiful or strange ways.

Gardens and art encourage us to tend our own wild, to explore both useful and fruitless boundaries, and to see what can grow within us with a bit of work, dirt, light, and imagination.

hannah g, curator, text excerpts from curatorial statement.

April 26 - May 24, 2019

aceartinc. gallery - Winnipeg, Canada

Multi-faceted work uses sculptural installation to combine curious material into experimental archaeological scenarios. Unusual juxtapositions of artificial and natural objects investigate the idiosyncrasies of organic growth, decay and exhumation processes.

This exhibition is generously supported by the Winnipeg Arts Council. I would like to express my deep gratitude for the support.

Their strength is secret. They send ferocious roots beneath the ground. They grow up and they grow down and grab the earth between their hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger. This is how they keep.

Didactic Wall quote by Sandra Cisneros (“Four Skinny Trees” in The House on Mango Street)

EMBODIMENT photos by Karen Asher

The struggle of a birch tree is revealed through processes of human intervention.  Organic matter such as bark and sap is combined with manufactured material such as acupuncture needles, glass, vintage mannequin hand, and electric light to memorialize the felled tree.    

9 September - 29 October, 2022

Shirley Richardson Craft Gallery, C2 Centre for Craft, Winnipeg, Manitoba

Curated by Seema Goel

My work was created after many hours of discussions with scientists Ande Brown and Dr. Carla Zelmer.

Vivarium Migration, an installation of ‘cultivated’ woolly hybrid creatures, is based loosely upon the invasive spongy moth introduced to North America for the silk industry. Its polyphagous larvae defoliate both deciduous and coniferous trees, then migrate en masse in search of new food. Native trees have limited ability to survive these attacks without the presence of natural predatory controls for the moths. My research found that spring drought prevents the growth of a fungal disease that collapses outbreaks of this moth; as a result of the recorded decrease in spring precipitation in the US South and midwest the spread of this moth and its accompanying devastation is expected to expand. This work contemplates the interconnectedness of species, monocultures and global warming. 

Two breeding populations of gypsy moth detected in Manitoba (St. Germain and La Salle, 2009 and Winnipeg, 2012) have been eradicated. Monitoring by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) continues across Manitoba.

9 September - 29 October, 2022

Shirley Richardson Craft Gallery, C2 Centre for Craft, Winnipeg, Manitoba

Curated by Seema Goel

My work was created after many hours of discussions with scientists Ande Brown and Dr. Carla Zelmer.

The (Wardian Case) Collection contains diseased tree microcosms in cloth and plastic terrarium-like pouches to suggest safe storage of infected tree material. Paradoxically, the cloth allows contaminants to filter outward into the air. This work references the 19th century practice of collecting and transporting plant specimens from the new world back to Europe for study, and the subsequent reverse migration of plants from Europe to the Americas, in the glass cases created by Nathaniel Ward. These cases allowed the specimens’ survival during the long sea voyages and eventually became the aquariums and vivariums we use today to hold displaced aquatic and tropical species for our curiosity. This piece highlights the difficulty in containing the spread of disease within the tree canopy (especially monocultures) as well as between humans, and between species. 

September 12 - November 10, 2022

Gallery 1C03

The University of Winnipeg, Manitoba

“Stone Lung” is an object of wondrous dread. The sculpture lurks on the floor of the exhibition space like a hybrid life form. The starting point was an uprooted stump of a birch tree that, when pulled from the earth, was found to be clutching a stone in its roots. Chappel added a found mannequin hand and a plastic hair net, and all these dead things together take on a haunted kind of creature-ly life. The hand is outstretched, offering what could be a benediction, curse or entreaty: remember that we are connected, and that our fates are intertwined. Our garbage, and our human arrogance, will come back to haunt us, so we need to figure out how to live with our ghosts.

Erica Mendritzki, curator, text from exhibition brochure.

February 4 - March 4, 2023

Anna Leonowens - Port Loggia & Treaty Space Gallery

NSCAD University Port Campus, Halifax, NS

August 22, 2024 - January 5, 2025

Art Gallery of Grande Prairie

Grande Prairie, AB

Curated by Erica Mendritzki Assistant Curator Melanie Zurba

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing speaks of the need to create “wonder in the midst of dread,” * as we try to figure out how to continue living on a damaged planet. The mongrel forms of Connie Chappel’s sculptures are animated by this sense of mixed-up awe and angst.“The Dance” is small and impish, a piece of wood in love with a dryer ball, ready to scamper away with its stolen emerald-coloured treasure. In “In the Presence of a Tree,” a branch coils around a thudding purplish foot. The “presence” here seems like something supernatural. I imagine a decomposing human limb suddenly jolted into zombie-like animation by a tree branch looking for a new way to move. Another piece, “Washed Ashore,” is made of an old stocking stuffed with wool, with red bands of netting encircling the flaccid worm-like body. The creatureliness of Chappel’s work is funny, but also a little worrying. It reminds us that our garbage, and our human arrogance, will come back to haunt us, so we need to figure out how to live with our ghosts.

Erica Mendritzki, curator, text from exhibition brochure.

*Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “Anna L. Tsing on Creating ‘Wonder in the Midst of Dread.’” Interview with Ben Eastham, Art Review, 29 November 2021. https://artreview.com/anna-l-tsing-on-creating-wonder-in-the-midst-of-dread/.

20 August - 8 September, 2020

AllArtNow Lab, Stockholm, Sweden

Meta Mask is a series of sculptural relief masks built from photographs of bark from trees in various states of health. Made from paper, the masks became by-products of trees. Displayed alongside each mask is the corresponding full tree image noting the longitude/latitude location and sea level of each. My interest in trees’ ability to filter air linked to the use of COVID-19 masks.

This exhibition is generously supported by the Winnipeg Arts Council and the Manitoba Arts Council. I would like to express my deep gratitude for the support.

installation photo by Katarina Eismann

A weathered log presents as a body form displaying  tassels of beard lichen (usnea) and a transformative scale of pixie cup lichen (cladonia). Lichen thrives within a symbiotic relationship between algae and fungus.  Loss of diversity in the lichen community is a response to changing climate and environments. 

These assemblage sculptures integrate unearthed organic material such as rocks, roots, branches and tree trunks with fabricated body fragments salvaged from flea market discards. They reference the underground through the excavation of dead plant and tree matter. The attached limbs suggest a human connection to the earth. The sculptures also furnish a second life to overlooked discarded matter both natural and manufactured by displaying them together at above-ground level. My intention is to align aspects of the natural community with that of the human condition. Some aspects include adaptation, diversity, self-generation, and the inescapability of death. The connection between human life and the natural world is essential during the struggle for survival.

Their strength is secret. They send ferocious roots beneath the ground. They grow up and they grow down and grab the earth between their hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger. This is how they keep.

Quote by Sandra Cisneros (“Four Skinny Trees” in The House on Mango Street)

aceartinc. gallery - Winnipeg, Canada 2019

Installation of one hundred dangling fungal knots animated by air current.

A new species of fungal specimen emerge.

Dying.exhibits is where the world of art, culture, and end-of-life in contemporary times collide. It invites the audience to re-evaluate their relationship with life and death. Existentialism is explored through varied art forms with a focus on the realms of fragility, death, dying, loss and grief.

January 14 - January 31, 2023

Artscape Youngplace, Toronto, ON