When Laura Millard first encountered, on lakes near Banff, the clear ice and the complex patterns of air bubbles frozen within it, she was drawn to the gestural quality of the skate marks on the surface while simultaneously experiencing vertiginous shifts between micro and macro views. Being able to see the lake bottom, the lines etched across the surface, and the surrounding landscape and sky reflected in the ice, she was able to record their fusion — of under, through and above — in her photographs. These split second captures were then over-painted to blur their readability and to slow down the act of looking at the images.

Millard migrates between fact and fiction, creating an open-ended dialogue between photography and painting, pitting the veracity of photography against the painterly qualities of abstraction.

Sarah Nind’s new exhibition, désir, employs mixed media processes — photographic documentation mediated by paint and digital technology. The resulting images exhibit characteristics of photography as an objective, albeit illusionary, medium — a recording device of the real — and painting as a subjective surface, able to transcend literal description.

Désir presents images of landscape and cityscape as mirrors of each other, and proposes the desire for home and shelter as a longing rather than fulfillment.  The architectural grid that underlies the structure of our urban reality is considered to be an extension of patterns in nature, resulting in an ambiguous melding of the two.  Thus, all landscape is romantic and distressed, actual and imagined, inhabited and empty. The self and the environment it inhabits are indistinguishable and inseparable.