OPENING RECEPTION Wednesday 18-May, 2011 / 7:00pm
David Pollock & Jamie Drouin
This selection of new photographic works by David Pollock and Jamie Drouin are collected under the banner Tracings. The word signifies not only what is left behind from a process, but also representation through mapping, which shares with photography the precise rendition of a topography.
Pollock’s large-scale colour landscape photographs, documenting the farmlands of Vancouver Island's Saanich Peninsul are contrasted by Douin's minature black and white prints of unknown locations and fragments of urban topography.
In both of these works the artists share a vision of the shifting ground of their environment when presenting traces of activity that continually transform landscapes. Pollock's richly detailed landscapes, from his series Fertile Geometry, presents this elemental topography as a palimpsest upon which we discern the signs of farm work. Pollock places us within a deep open space where the vantage point directs our vision to the soil, which is the skin of the Earth upon which we stand.
Drouin's intimate pictorial spaces depict the macroscopic intersections of landscape within urban environments. The tiny, fragile prints turn the flotsam and jetsam of urban living into constructions as mysterious and visceral as a crime scene photograph. Extending upon the idea of Tracings, Drouin interrupts the transparency of the photographic window by altering the surface of the print. The scratches, folds and cracks mimic the markings upon the landscape but also refer to the utilitarian uses of photography as evidence or as reference, like a map.
Although stylistically divergent these photographs speak to us of the remnants of human actions and situate us within a continuum of constant interaction with the natural world.
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