To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong?
Andrea Carlson, Annie MacDonell, Kevin Schmidt, Jennifer Rose Sciarrino, Erin Shirreff
Past Exhibition
Mar 11 – May 29 2011
Erin Shirreff, Roden Crater, 2009. Single-channel HD video. Courtesy the artist and Lisa Cooley Fine Art, New York.
- SUPPORT DONORS
Shanitha Kachan & Gerald Sheff Nancy McCain & Bill Morneau Laura Rapp & Jay Smith Presented with the support of Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis.
Andrea Carlson, Annie MacDonell, Kevin Schmidt, Jennifer Rose Sciarrino, and Erin Shirreff craft topographies of the imagination detached from geographic reality and the experience of actually “being there.” Instead they filter their images of the earth through conceptual practices, archival research, cultural references, and technologies of simulation. After years of critically debating the landscape genre – particularly in Canada – these artists achieve complex, fantastical visions of land, sky and sea apropos to the twenty-first century.
Annie MacDonell’s sculptural “iceberg” and her black-and-white photographic collages draw from the 1967 patriotic photographic tome To Everything There is a Season by Roloff Beny, developing the book’s overtly mystical view of the Canadian landscape. Jennifer Rose Sciarrino produces delicate sculptures that simulate elements of the natural environment, evoking the uncanny with mountains carved from paper and artificial geological crystals cast from resin. Erin Shirreff began making her 2009 video Roden Crater by printing out a photograph found online of James Turrell’s unfinished monument of land art. She then rephotographed the image under various kinds of lighting, artificially mimicking the changing sky above the crater. Andrea Carlson’s mixed-media pieces feature vibrant seascapes and iconic images from a variety of sources (such as museum artifacts) enclosed in ornate irises; these works on paper position waterways as fluid cultural conduits of trade, interaction and conflict. Finally, Kevin Schmidt’s 2009 video Disappearing Act stages an odd optical illusion in the wilderness. Schmidt located a majestic vista and reproduced it with paint onto a nearby tree, thereby transforming its trunk into a kind of hollowed-out viewfinder – at least on first glance.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring an introduction by curator Jon Davies (Assistant Curator at The Power Plant), artist biographies and a checklist. In addition, Christian Bök's poem "Midwinter Glaciaria" will be available as a printed takeaway.
Andrea Carlson, The Tempest and Portage, both 2008. Both mixed media on paper, 300 × 240 cm. each. Courtesy of Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis. Photo: Steve Payne.
Jennifer Rose Sciarrino, Specimen, undefined
To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong? Photo: Steve Payne.
Kevin Schmidt, Disappearing Act, 2009. Single-channel HD video, colour, sound, 10 min. Courtesy the artist and Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.
Annie MacDonell, Day Break (Eternity, like a crystal wall), 2010. Piezographic inkjet. Courtesy the artist and Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, Toronto.
Jennifer Rose Sciarrino, Proposal for a Mountain 1, 2011. Paper and archival glue, 42 × 24 × 16 cm. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Steve Payne.
SPRING 2011 PROGRAM GUIDE
