MOVING WHILE LOOKING AT THINGS THAT DO NOT MOVE
Laura Findlay
The Cube
January 14 to March 25, 2017
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
Moving While Looking at Things That Do Not Move emerges from the writing of Scottish author Nan Shepherd (1893-1981) and her book The Living Mountain. In it, Shepherd champions a prolonged and contemplative experience of the landscape, foregoing a hurried ascent to a mountain peak in favour of savouring the expanse of the plateau. Shepherd asserts that “moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one’s sense of outer reality.”
Laura Findlay’s project questions the current role of history painting through notions of narrative, empathy and the sublime. Her recent work examines historical events from fragments of evidence, re-examining the past through landscapes of dormant volcanoes. Having researched environments such as Volcanoes National Park in Hawai’i and Wells Grey Provincial Park north of Kamloops, the artist collected documents, images and data of historical and current geologic records. This exhibition includes an array of objects with cylindrical imagery and textures meant to be observed from all sides, revealing the static but shifting landscape of vessels.
Findlay's sculptural objects play against static painted depictions of the wall of The Cube, shifting focus between object and image, natural and human-made landscapes. The works move in relation to each other much like viewing a hierarchy of mountain range and landscape slowly hiding and emerging new views as one moves through the space, hinting at clues gained and lost to history, both geological and human.
The body of work developed for this exhibition emerged from research over the past year and her time living and working in Kamloops.
Installation view of Laura Findlay:
Moving While Looking at Things That Do Not Move
Photo: Cory Hope, Kamloops Art Gallery
