REVIEWS:
human / nature
Excerpts from an
essay by Amy Gogarty
The exhibition human/nature presents
work by four Canadian artists. Lyndal Osborne, Laura
Vickerson, Amy Leowan and Liz Ingram, to the Chinese
cities of Shanghai and Hong Kong. As I write this, I
can not help but wonder what expectations a Chinese
audience has for works from Canada, a land so far away,
so foreign, yet, historically, so linked with China
for several centuries. As I write this, I am aware that
my words will be translated into Chinese, that you might
be reading this in Chinese. I wonder which aspects of
the artworks translate across language and culture and
which get"lost in translation". Of these artists,
one was born in Hong Kong, one in Australia and one
spent her youth in India. The fourth was born in Canada,
yet she has exhibited her work around the world. If
there is a subtext to this show, it is that we no longer
know for certain what is familiar, what is foreign.
If the work of the first three artists can be characterized
as additive, comprising the manipulating, pinning or
weaving together of multiple components, Liz Ingrams
work appears by contrast, hermetic, technological and
self-contained. she presents back-lit photo-based transparencies,
which draw subversively on advertising to address the
most natural and immediate of subjects: water, "
like you've never seen before". Water serves as
the perfect vehicle for representing her many concerns.
In its physical structure, it shifts between solid.
liquid and gaseous states; as a symbol, it hearkens
back to ancient Greece as one of the four fundamental
elements, and, as a biological resource, it is essential
to life. Her curved light boxes derive from a single
series, Sacred Stream (I-V)(2001). She brings years
of experience as a printmaker to bear on her manipulation
of the photographic images, which she produced using
her own body, a bathtub, an open shutter and a flashing
light. Multiple exposures and aleatory effects of light
create tableaux of great intricacy and movement. The
decision to layer and back-light these images arose
from her practice of viewing transparencies against
a light table while designing muliple-plate prints.
The lighting relates them to the computer screen, yet
these images are produced almost in mute protest against
the deperson-alizing cultural effect of the ubiquitous,
computer-generated advertising. Ingram spent much of
her youth in India, where the extremes of poverty contrasted
with heightened sensuality, spiritual wealth andrespect
for natural resources. she credits this experience for
developing her interest in "bodily intelligence,"
transistional states, environmental resources and intimacy.
In these images, female hands connote the body of the
maker; they embrace and caress the shimmering water
with unbridled sensuality. As the pure water pulses,
silver bubbles blur the boundary of limb and liquid,
creating a liminal space of fusion. Ingram brings together
two themes that have obsessed her as an artist - the
body and water - to create a poetic metaphor for tran-sience,
vulnerability and preciousness. It is her on-going concern
for the balance between the human and the natural world,
and the embodied self and spirit that links this work
to the others in the exhibition.
Additional Reviews
human/nature
essay in its entirety
by Amy Gogarty from the catalogue human/nature, 2004
human/nature
review,
Vue Magazine, at the Lando Gallery,2004,by Agnieszka
Matejko
Edmonton
Airports Commission,
2004, by Agnieszka Matejko
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