The Conjuros (2026)
The Conjurors is a sculptural installation that examines how abstract representation is being mobilized to give form to emerging systems of ecological and environmental accounting designed to “value” nature. The work takes its title from Hieronymus Bosch’s 1502 painting *The Conjuror*, in which spectacle becomes a vehicle for deception, drawing a parallel with the forms of political and economic theatre that surround contemporary efforts to quantify the natural world.
Central to these efforts is the concept of “natural capital”: the idea that air, water, soils, forests, minerals, and life-supporting ecological systems can be understood as assets within an expanded economic framework. Increasingly incorporated into models of environmental accounting, natural capital extends conventional economic methods to forms of life and ecological processes that have historically remained outside market valuation.
These models do more than introduce new categories of assets. They seek to establish common methods for pricing, valuing, monetizing, and financializing nature. Depending on the interests involved, such mechanisms are presented either as tools for protecting ecosystems from overexploitation or as ways of ensuring that new opportunities for economic growth are not overlooked.
Constructed at human scale from wood, steel, copper, industrial minerals, and plastic mesh, the sculptures bring tactility, weight, and material resistance to the abstractions they reference. They occupy and “perform” within the exhibition space alongside visitors. Each sculpture is individually titled and accompanied by a short text that situates its materials within the global political economy of commodities and the extractive relationships to nature that this economy sustains.
The Conjuros, 2026, installation: wood, metal, thread, paper, and ink. Variable dimensions. Installation view, Nanaimo Art Gallery, Nanaimo, BC, 2026. Photo credits: Horse and Sparrow.
