Shared Terrain: DesignTO Project Exhibition

‘Shared Terrain’ is a group exhibition that fosters cultural exchange between the Nordic Region and Canada. This exhibition is structured around exchange and conversation between 10 creatives from distant locations who are collaborating with each other for the first time.

Artists and designers from Canada and the Nordic Region are paired in 5 groups, working together virtually from September to December to create new work for the exhibition. They are invited to be inspired by each other, exploring the connections between their practices with respect to their regional locations and cultural histories.

This exhibition features the work of Carissa Baktay (Canada and Iceland), Laura Millard (Canada), Teemu Salonen (Finland), Randi Samsonsen (Faroe Islands), Katarina Spik Skum (Sápmi, Sweden), Anie Toole (Canada), Lillian Tørlen (Norway), Wednesday Architecture (Denmark), Justine Woods (Aabitaawizininiwag, Canada), and Boris Yu (Canada).

Field Trip: TRACE. LIVE TALK WITH LAURA MILLARD

Laura Millard’s exhibition trace, on view at the Visual Arts Centre’s McClure Gallery, engages with the language of drawing and gesture in relation to the landscape while questioning the traces our actions leave behind.

Millard’s process begins with drawings that she views as performances in the landscape. She photographs these from far overhead with a drone, and then uses paint and drawing materials to work into the print, adding marks made by the hand to those captured in the image. Selected images are printed onto fabric to use in lightboxes scaled to the height of the viewer. The lightboxes envelop the viewer, casting light and the reflected image into the space. These immersive experiences of place visualize precarious landscapes on the verge of radical change.

Millard has made her line drawings in remote and familiar places, from using a recovered fishing net and rope in Svalbard, Norway, to using snowmobiles and ice skates in northern Canadian locales. The ephemeral nature of these drawings done on ice, sand and snow points to the impermanent nature of our time in these places and the hubris of ‘leaving our mark’.

The Arctic Circle – Artist & Scientist Residency Program

The Arctic Circle is a nexus where art intersects science, architecture, education, and activism – an incubator for thought and experimentation for artists and innovators who seek out and foster areas of collaboration to engage in the central issues of our time. Artist and scientist led, The Arctic Circle is an annual expeditionary residency program. Established in 2009, The Arctic Circle brings together international artists of all disciplines, scientists, architects, and educators who collectively explore the high-Arctic Svalbard Archipelago and Arctic Ocean aboard a specially outfitted Barquentine sailing vessel. The Arctic Circle provides a shared experience for its participants to engage in the myriad issues relevant to our time and to develop professionally through fieldwork and research, interdisciplinary collaborations, exhibit opportunities, and public and classroom engagement. The Arctic Circle program supports the creation and exhibition of new and pioneering work, and aims to empower the creative individual while fostering the collaborative.

The Arctic Circle – Artist & Scientist Residency Program

Thank you to the Ontario Arts Council.

Blake Gopnik on Art

http://blakegopnik.com/post/166955906703

Oct 30, 2017

THE WEEKLY PIC: This is a detail from Laura Millard’s big, backlit image called “Crossing,” now on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, in the show called “Every. Now. Then: Reframing Nationhood.” (Click on my image to see Millard’s full piece.)

Canada’s nationhood, up for grabs in the AGO show, has always been built around ideas of nature, winter and wildlife. Millard’s piece addresses all three: It shows a vast “drawing” that she cut into a snowy landscape with a snowmobile, then photographed with the help of a drone. Passing deer decided to add their own touch, and I’m particularly pleased with how the contribution of such “disorderly” beasts is perfectly rectilinear, whereas the drawing they tread on, made by a supposedly “rational” human, is a knotted mess.

Since its founding as a nation state, and before, Canada has treated the natural world as a blank slate on which its colonists had the right to make whatever mark they chose. Millard has taken that literally, using the messiest, noisiest, smelliest drawing tool she could find.  Her piece is both deeply abstract, in a Pollock-ian mode – Jackson, too, liked to work on the horizontal – and as tied to the world and its troubles as any art could be.

Do her three passing deer provide hope that nature may yet overwrite humanity’s mark? Or are we more likely to read them as a sign that nature is being scribbled out?