Work being shown
Now that the dust has settled from the Opening of Boundary|time|Surface, I am happy to say that Dr. John Waldron and I will be presenting a talk on the project, and the ideas behind our collaboration!
This Saturday, September 14, at 2pm – if you’re in the area, please join us at the Art Gallery of St. Albert for our discussion:
“Boundary|Time|Surface:
Art and Geology in Dialogue”
Well.
Here we are – a few hours from the opening reception to Boundary|Time|Surface.
This still point in the process always feels a little surreal. So much goes into the making of an exhibition. In this case, 5 years from the original project to now; at least a solid year of research and work in the studio; lots of challenges, changes, and rewards along the way.
Am I nervous? Yes, to be honest. I feel far too close to the work to be able to assess its merits at this point … one tends to dwell on the things that only hindsight reveals. But here we are.
It’s all process anyway – every work and every exhibition speaks to what is next, and new ways of doing.
At any rate, if you are around in the area, please join us tonight. It would be lovely to see you.
It’s officially one week from today that Boundary|Time|Surface opens at the Art Gallery of St. Albert! Not quite sure how the time flew by so fast (well, actually yes, I am – in the studio!) – but regardless – I find there’s always a sense of time speeding up just before a show.
And it’s been busy on a number of fronts: the not-glamourous jobs an artist does to make the stuff all happen the way it should for an exhibition.
Case in point (sorry of the awful sort-of pun):
Packing. Ah yes, making work is one thing – packing it is another entirely! Fortunately, I didn’t have to build crates for the work this time, as we can transport it ourselves – but the work still needs protection. And list -making becomes part of this process too, of course. Making sure that all the bits and bobs of hardware and tools and just-in-case things are sorted and packed and there when we need them for install.
And then there’s the transport part of it too:
Spent a couple of hours playing ‘car tetris’ with the bins and boxes and other stuff … and in a little while, we’ll be getting this all unloaded and dropped off at the Gallery.
HOLY MOLY. Here we go!
There’s more to the upcoming exhibition of Boundary|Time|Surface – another labour of love attached to the work that I will be launching into the world on September 5th.
To accompany the exhibition, we will be launching a limited-edition book!
Boundary|Time|Surface – a record of change gathers essays that examine the work on exhibition and the ideas informing its creation from several distinct perspectives. A critical essay from Melinda Pinfold, PhD opens the book, and offers an insightful reading of the project as a whole, and the dialogue between art & science informing the project. John Waldron’s essay explores the history of geology as a science, and how his understanding of time and place is informed by a lifetime of practice within the discipline. And I spend a few pages in both prose and poetry trying my best convey what the original project – and the several years of work coming out of that original ephemeral installation – have taught me.
Boundary|Time|Surface – a record of change also functions as an artwork; we have selected a range of images from the time lapse stills we shot of the creation and dissolution of the installation at Green Point, and presented them in sequence in the style of a flip-book.
This is a limited-edition of 200, signed and numbered. For the duration of the exhibition, the book will be available exclusively through the Art Gallery of St. Albert.
It’s been a head-down, get-things-done time for several months now. Board work, projects in various stages of development requiring attention, travel, … and soon, an exhibition of work.
I am thrilled to have had the opportunity to return to the Boundary|Time|Surface project over the last several months – digging back into the images and video, thinking through the ideas again, making new work.
And soon, the results of that revisiting will be on exhibition at the Art Gallery of St. Albert!
The exhibition opens on September 5 2019, at 6:00 pm. – and continues until November 2 2019.
It has been a really interesting process to look at this body of work with the fresh eyes of time and distance, and to consider the ways in which my perceptions of the place and the thoughts it provoked have both changed, and stayed the same. Interesting too, that many of the concerns I had that were brought to bear on the first iteration of work for gallery presentation have only become more urgent – closer to the bone for me.
Every time I look at the photos and video I took in 2014 during my residency in Gros Morne National Park, I learn something more. About myself and what I value as a human being, as much about the nuances in the place itself. It was good and difficult work to go back into the material, push harder with research and art-making both, and consider the implications of bringing this work (in essence) almost all the way across the country for a second showing.
A good friend and fellow artist asked me once “when do you know the work is finished?” For this body of work … I don’t know that I will ever be “finished” – at the least, not with the ideas inherent in the project. But I am, overall, happy with the results of reading and writing and running down rabbit holes of ideas that has been going on for the past year.
SO – this exhibition with feature a good bit of brand-new work, and those pieces from 2016 that ‘made the cut’ will have new conversations and readings in relation to what I’ve been working on/through. This is also the first time this work (in any iteration) had been shown west of Newfoundland … so even “old” work feels new in this context.
I hope those of you reading this in the Edmonton, Alberta, Canada region will join me at the opening (more exciting news on that to follow soon!) … hope to see you there.
Happy to say that the video work I did in collaboration with Deborah Carruthers – Slippages & Panelled/Slippages – is in a Group Exhibition at Zygote Gallery in Cleveland OH. Capturing the Aura of the Already Said, curated by Margaret Hart, is on exhibition until April 26th.
An Excerpt of the performance video with synched audio below:
And Panelled/Slippages, full length with audio:
After a whirlwind – and lovely – trip to Vancouver to install Macromareal(redux) at ECUAD, Scott and I are back in Edmonton and digging into all the other work we have to do.
Part of that for me has been editing the first batch of documentation from this exhibition, so I can share it with you.
So – without further hoopla:
And here are a few stills, for good measure!
Just back from a whirlwind trip to Vancouver with my friend & collaborator Scott Smallwood – we installed Macromareal(redux) at Emily Carr for a month-long exhibition, and spoke to some of the students there.
Not sure I’ve caught my breath – but tomorrow (February 28) I will be speaking again, with another collaborator, about another project – this time, at the University of Alberta.
At 6pm, Dr. John Waldron and I will be speaking about our project, Boundary|Time|Surface, as part of the LASERAlberta series of talks on art/science collaborations.
I am really grateful & excited to have this opportunity to share this project with the wider community here – and I’m really looking forward to the feedback and discussion!
You can find more info about the talk & the project here … .
If you are in the neighbourhood, please join us!
I thought the beginning of this year was going to be relatively quiet – a time just to hunker down & work in the studio through the cold months.
There’s certainly been a good bit of that – preparations for an exhibition in the Fall – but then a lovely opportunity came up …
I am very excited to share that Scott Smallwood and I have bene invited to exhibit some of our collaborative work at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Macromareal (redux) will be shown in ~Diffuser Gallery at ECUAD from February 26 – March 24 inclusive.
We will be heading out to Vancouver on Sunday to begin installing the work, and will also be speaking to some of the EUCAD classes about the project and our respective practices.
Looking forward immensely to this little get-away, and to the opportunity to share this work from the East Coast with a West Coast audience!
If you are in the Vancouver area, I hope you can stop in and see it – would love to hear your thoughts.
Been a busy busy Autumn – two exhibitions. travel to Lethbridge & Nova Scotia, Board work with CARFAC and Copyright Visual Arts
… and now, I get to seriously “dig in” in the studio in the coming months, and revisit Boundary|Time|Surface! Very excited to be looking at this body of work again with fresh eyes, and to being to create new work for it, in anticipation of exhibition in the Fall of 2019 at the Art Gallery of St Albert.
I was also surfing through the EGU website today – the call for new abstracts for 2019 just hit my inbox.
This prompted the surf, and a bit of a walk on memory lane: John and I presented on Boundary|Time|Surface at the European Geosciences Union in Vienna a few years ago, and it was a wonderful experience.
In browsing the EGU site, I also came across this – a lovely blog post about the session convenor’s response to our project. It brought back the very lively discussions we had with so many people at our poster – about scientific discourse, about place and memory, about the ways in which human definitions and descriptions of things and places can create (and erase!!) different kinds of understanding. Different ways of seeing.
Looking forward to investigating this gloriously complicated place and all my ideas about it.
Off to the studio!
