Opening
Saturday, February 16
Artist Present
2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Sarah Nind’s new exhibition, “Mnemonic Structures,” employs mixed-media processes – oil painting and photographic documentation mediated by digital technology. Through the use of colour, line, and abstraction of form, it references the architectural grid of the built environment and the illusion of three-dimensional form. The grid, the underlying structure of contemporary architecture, works as a metaphor for the universal conformity of modern urban landscape.

Photographic images in the work document these constructed environments and trace memories of places inhabited, seen, or merely imagined. These photographic fragments are intentionally ambiguous about their location in time or space, thus alluding to the uniformity of the contemporary urban landscape with its apparent loss of cultural specificity and regional distinction. At times they seem to be warm and protective – the steps of the square where one can sit at lunch, the cypress trees that caress the edge of the roadway. Other times they are apparently empty and barren – the relentless wall of a steel and glass façade, the city street empty of traffic on a weekend afternoon.

As a reflection on the constructed and man-made world, the work is based upon personally documented imagery collected from places recently traveled. Memories are interwoven to such a degree fiction and fact are blurred: the real and fictive become indistinguishable, paint and photograph, while distinct, become one.

Opening
In Gallery 2
Saturday, February 16
Artist Present
2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

In Laura Millard’s new work the historical idea of a limitless, sublime nature is played against the capacities of digital technologies and paint. Shot at one eight-thousandth of a second and magnified four hundred times, Millard’s images of waterfalls are digitally altered then blown up to seven feet. The resulting images are then slowly over-painted to articulate individual water droplets. By conflating a split second capture with the meticulous, time-consuming act of hand rendering, Millard considers both the rush of time and the desire to hold it at bay.

Photographed at Panther Falls below the Athabasca Glacier of the Columbia Ice Field, Millard’s images reflect her own astonishment over the rapid disappearance of the glacier she has known all of her life. As a hydrological apex, the Ice Field is the most important source of clean fresh water in North America. By melding the instantaneous speed of digital imagery to the sustained and careful act of painting, Millard seeks to slow the consumption of an image digitally captured in an instant.