Kelly Jaclynn Andres / Latent Swamp
March 20 – April 25, 2026
PAVED Arts, 424 20th St. W. Saskatoon
Open during the Riversdale Art Walk: Friday, March 20, 4–8 pm
Opening reception: Friday, March 20, 8–10 pm
Related Events:
Latent Swamp Field Lab w/ Kelly Andres: Saturday, March 21, 12–3 pm
The Water Lentil Trials, A Focus Group: Thursday, April 23, 2026
Latent Swamp is a speculative wetland in which machine learning, living systems, and human participation co-compose one another. The work unfolds as a hybrid habitat of biological and technological life, combining prototypes of duckweed growth modules for living duckweed cultivation, bioremediation processes, cyanotype printing, latent-space animation, and custom-trained generative models.
Images in Latent Swamp are not treated as representations but as events. Sculptures generate conditions for seeing without stabilizing what is seen; water circulates, reflects, filters, and stains; plants collaborate with light and chemistry to produce photograms that are inseparable from care and ecological consequence. From within StyleGAN models trained on the artist’s own datasets of duckweed, decoy ducks, and duckweed, images emerge through negotiation rather than authorship as condensed expressions of what the system has learned to notice.
A projected animation continuously navigates multiple latent spaces, revealing generative ecologies in motion rather than fixed pictures. These images hover between recognition and refusal, asking how perception is shaped by datasets, algorithms, environmental conditions, and embodied attention. Seeing becomes distributed across plants, cameras, water, machine vision, and human bodies.
Emerging from the artist’s rural lakeside environment, the installation foregrounds water as both material and metaphor. In a bioremediation lightroom, duckweed filters water reused for cyanotype printing, folding image-making back into ecological cycles. Edible water-lentil treats invite visitors to encounter the swamp through ingestion, extending the circuit from data to metabolism.
Latent Swamp resists the comfort of the picture as an image that frames, resolves, and reassures. Instead, it proposes image-making as a form of response-ability: an entangled practice in which images participate in the world’s becoming, clouding perception, redistributing agency, and asking what it means to see from within a living system rather than above it.
This exhibition is funded by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts.
