Meltwater at Leo Kamen Gallery

From Laura Millard on Artsync by Michele Speciale:

Living in a world where you can glance at the days’ top stories on your Blackberry in the time it takes you to walk from your bed to the bathroom; or skim your eyes over 24-hour news feeds streamed live from street corners and waiting rooms; it is virtually impossible for us to stay uninformed about what’s going on in the world.  Artist Laura Millard’s new series of paintings are asking us to slow down for a moment and consider that he difference between the act of looking at something and seeing it can be a whole world of understanding.

Millard’s Meltwater waterfall paintings immerse us inside Alberta’s dripping Columbia icefield glaciers, which contain the extent of our freshwater supply. Seamlessly melding painting onto photography, Millard has stopped time so we can actually see the slow process of these melting wonders. Using her photographs as a starting point, Millard’s iridescent and opaque brushwork accentuate prismic colours of sun-lit water droplets captured from 1/400th 1/1600th of a second, bringing their light to the foreground, while pushing back the rock face.  These contrasts create veils of imaginary layers, pulling us into a deeper sensation of spatiality.

 

Laura