Heather Savard’s artistic practice is responsive and a process-based exploration of household objects and structures. She makes use of sculpture, installation, drawing, and expanded forms of printmaking to explore how value is assigned in material culture. Her previous research questions have revolved around what it means to be good and what it means for something to hold value.

Savard’s work comprises recurring themes, such as the origins of middle-class objects of luxury, the tension between the duty of safekeeping and the guilt of discarding, and the current overwhelming, abundant need to buy as a form of self-improvement and optimization marketed in consumer culture. The experience of examining what is valuable to them personally has furthered her curiosity into the connection between the individual and societal drive to pursue valuable objects as both an act of living better and a signal to others.

Ethical philosopher Agnes Callard, in her essay 'Who Wants to Play the Status Game,' describes three games played: (1) The Basic Game, (2) Importance Game, and (3) Leveling Game. In the Basic Game, 'you are looking for common ground on the basis of which your conversation might proceed,' and it is a straightforward assessment of your conversational counterpart. She details the more advanced games of determining status via the Importance Game, where 'participants jockey for position,' dropping hints of wealth, connections, or affluence. The Leveling game 'uses empathy to equalize players' and 'reaches down low to achieve common ground' (Callard). Savard is interested in how objects can be used to 'signal enough power to establish a hierarchy' and fit within the Importance Game as described by Callard.

Greens, Project Gallery, 2024.

In his collection of essays, 'The Anthropocene Reviewed,' John Green briefly charts the evolution of the American Lawn, where he describes how the 'quality of lawns in the neighborhood began to be seen as a proxy for the quality of the neighborhood itself' (83). Savard’s work in this exhibition explores this relationship using the language of the formal French Garden, with its orderly and hierarchical representations of rules and governance over nature, in combination with contemporary materials used in current home and landscape design. How does the idealized version of the North American lawn fit into the Importance Game played between neighbors while being wrapped up, for Savard at least, inside of the ever-seemingly untenable goal of homeownership?

Heather Savard’s exhibition Greens will be on view in the Project Gallery of the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art from March 15 - April 27 2024.