Thu, April 2, 2015 5:00 PM - 8:00 PM UBC Point Grey Campus. Join our opening reception of Life Off Grid: Reassembling Domestic Life with Jonathan Taggart, writer-photographer and UBC PhD student. Refreshments will be available. Or, come by to view the exhibition in the Lobby Gallery between March 23 – April 30. This exhibition is part of the Capture Photography Festival.
“Off-grid” isn’t a state of mind. It isn’t about someone being out of touch, about a place that is hard to get to, or about a weekend spent offline. “Off-grid” refers to homes that are disconnected from the electricity and the natural gas grid – homes (and sometimes entire towns) that are therefore self-sufficient for light, power, and heat. Off-grid homes are experimental labs for our collective future. Their way of life may be only one of many possible adaptations to the challenges presented by climate change, but the lessons off-gridders are learning today about living with renewable energy are the lessons we will all need to learn tomorrow in order to make our lives more sustainable, more respectful toward the environment, and less dependent on non-renewable resources.
From 2011 to 2013 Jonathan Taggart and Dr. Phillip Vannini (Canada Research Chair in Innovative Learning and Public Ethnography; professor at Royal Roads University’s School of Communication and Culture) travelled Canada as part of a long-term ethnographic study of people living off the grid in every province and territory. ‘Life Off Grid’ presents photographs from these travels and interviews: it is an intimate look into unusual contemporary domestic lives, but also a call to the rest of us leading ordinary lives to examine what we take for granted about our homes, our needs, and our wants.
Jonathan Taggart is a PhD Student at UBC’s Institute for Resources, Environment & Sustainability and a member of the Boreal Collective of Documentary Photographers.
http://jonathantaggart.com/