Within our natural ecosystem, decomposition and decay play an essential role in the breakdown of organic matter, recycling it and making it available again for new organisms to utilise. Without decomposition and decay the world would overflow with plant, animal, and human remains. It would also experience a decline in new growth due to a shortage of nutrients that would be locked up and unavailable in dead forms that don’t rot. Decomposition releases these nutrients.

Decay, and its impacts on virtually all aspects of life, is considered in its various forms by Marli Davis, Shannon Garden-Smith, and Sara Maston in acts of preservation / acts of decay, a site-specific exhibition in the Clark Quadrangle adjacent to the Art Museum’s University of Toronto Art Centre. Invoking the tension between preservation and decay, the project draws attention to the University College courtyard as a site at once carefully maintained and susceptible to the decomposing force of the natural environment. If decay must happen, can we have a more thoughtful consideration of where it occurs and who and what it affects? How can we address the tenuous relationship between decay and preservation, and when can we begin to know when preservation must make space for decay and vice versa?