Uprooting, Jude Griebel, 2022, Acrylic and pencil crayon on paper, Photography by Blaine Campbell
Land Eater
September 2023 – August 2025
Jude Griebel’s solo exhibition Land Eater invites reflection on human interactions with land and our impacts on the natural ecologies of the world. While the artworks conceptually explore consumption and degradation, they invite a whimsical and open-ended curiosity into how we define land and our relationships with it. There is an uncanny tension present in Griebel’s anthropomorphized landscapes, and his protesting insect sculptures, where important questions arise around who (or what?) is truly holding the proverbial ‘talking stick’ in our current conversations around climate change and consumerism – if the land is talking, what is it saying? If the various organisms we share the earth are bearing signs of resistance, what specifically is the root of their dissent?
Each of the artworks in Land Eater contemplates incredibly complicated and nuanced relationships that humans navigate related to environmental stewardship. The questions raised here allow viewers to speculate on possibilities and encourage curiosity toward what the future may hold – not just for humans, but for all natural organisms – the living earth.
Curated by Ash Slemming
Touring from the Alberta Society of Artists, TREX Southwest
Artist Bio
Jude Griebel’s work explores humanity’s impact on the world by merging anatomies and landscapes into single sculptural forms and drawings. These detailed works provide new and fantastic understandings of eco-anxiety and speculate on possibilities beyond planetary collapse. His works visualize rampant cycles of human consumption and the resulting detriment to both the human self and the surrounding world. The mechanics of consumerism is a driving theme behind his work, with a specific focus on the factory food system and its implications for land depletion and climate shift.
The anthropomorphic qualities of his works borrow from a myriad of histories relating to the reimagined body — from Grotesque representations of the Renaissance era to shape-shifting characters of midcentury popular cartoons. The structuring of his sculptural figures incorporates diorama and display methods from traditional science and didactic models. When applied to Griebel’s imaginative introspections, these elements cause his drawings and his sculptures to waver between fantasy and objective understanding.