Stratigraphy - Exhibition Tour close Leora Gesser - Stratigraphy stra·tig·ra·phy
1. the branch of geology concerned with the order and relative position of strata and their relationship to the geological time scale.
The term “stratigraphy” is primarily used by geologists and focuses on the study of rock layers to investigate what occurred historically in an area. In addition, the term is used by archaeologists to identify the contents of strata in order to create a picture of the human culture that lived during a particular time. It is in the intersection of these two meanings that Leora Gesser began the visual investigation for this body of work. Using these scientific concepts to drive a personal discovery of the relationship between strata, time, boundaries, place, and culture, Stratigraphy examines what has come before us; celebrating the beauty of the earth’s layers on which we both metaphorically and physically stand. This exhibition features paintings and prints of landscapes that are curious and seemingly unknown – on closer examination there are signs, symbols, and layers that become more recognizable. Fossils, artifacts, and layers of strata representing events such as cooling, heating, flood, compression, drought, and human experience are captured by brushstrokes and reinterpreted in prints. The work is approached more as an emotive history rather than a series of landscape paintings. Elements of nature found above and under the ground loosely inform this work; artistic liberties draw us all closer to the fragility of our way of life. The future, all our future, is yet to be decided. Stratigraphy is a celebration of the richness and diversity that surrounds us in the natural world. Can it be that the layers of the earth as well as the layers of humanity stay forever etched in the ground around us and in our unconscious minds? Can it be that this is what draws us to a place and unknowingly creates a thread of connection that we do not acknowledge but just feel? While the entry point is recognizable traces found in nature, the viewer does not have the same traditional spatial orientation and recognizable boundaries – this playful depth perception means that realistic scale is of no consequence. Depicting the harmony and chaos in the textures, shapes, and colours found in a given space as well as the mosaic of the strata, this work represents the complexity and fragility of our planet, reminding us all of what is at stake.
And Even Dust Can Burst into Flames - Exhibit Tour close Genevieve Robertson - And Even Dust Can Burst into Flames Genevieve Robertson’s drawings involve extensive physical exploration and are materially linked to specific regions and their land and resource politics. This body of drawings uses pigments made with found carbon-based materials—coal, graphite, ash and wildfire-derived charcoal—collected in the East and West Kootenays where coal and graphite mining take place and climate-induced wildfires are increasing in severity. Gathered during walks to mine and forest fire sites, some of these materials are elementally linked to flora and fauna from the primordial past: both coal and graphite are produced from ancient living matter that has undergone immense transformation over millennia and are remnants of once-thriving ecosystems. While the arboreous region of the Kootenays is ecologically fecund, carbonized trees, smoke-filled skies, and falling ash are the apparitions of climate catastrophe. This project records a sustained effort to capture an elemental and animate quality embedded in these materials and is meant to evoke carbon’s duality as a life-bearing element and the effects of its accelerated use as a synthetic hydrocarbon. The title of the exhibition, And Even Dust Can Burst into Flames, considers the power of art to do work in the world, and in this context also gestures toward references of climate accelerated wildfires and their paradoxical relation to both regeneration and loss, the metamorphoses of materials over time, and the regenerative potential of drawing to invoke the origins of these materials. More specters than specimens, these granular, stratified, biomorphic images suggest botanical field studies of the 18th and 19th centuries. By collecting, excavating, processing, and drawing with found materials, Genevieve Robertson implicates herself in relationship to the history of these representations and the industrial use of these materials: the entanglement of human, non-human and geologic bodies that coexist in our biosphere.
The artist would like to thank the Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance for making this work possible through a Major Project grant, as well as the Narrows Art Retreat (Nelson, BC), Access Gallery (Vancouver, BC), Sitka Center for Art and Ecology (Otis, OR), and Pterodactyl Studio (Salt Spring Island, BC) where the work was produced. eocene CARBON STUDY ARTICLE - caitlin chaison