While no artists have ever captured northeastern Ontario as well as The Group of Seven, two contemporary artists are asking people to look beyond those archetypal images in a new exhibition at the Art Gallery of Sudbury titled Igneous Corpus (Body of Rock).
Kathy Browning's digital photographs capture nature's abstract art on rock cuts along Highway 69 S. She layers images to create photographic images that play with the colour and shapes exposed when the Canadian Shield was blasted for the four-laning of the highway south of Parry Sound. Other images were recorded north of Sudbury and in the French River area.
"Rock cuts are like a new canvas on which the art can happen and are like sculptures requesting my artistic engagement...The process of superimposing images of Northern Ontario rocks, water, and trees on photographs of rock generates a fusion of land and water, says the Thunder Bay native in her artistic statement.
Photographing along a busy highway wasn't always easy and sometimes dangerous, says Browning who teaches arts in the School of Education at Laurentian University. She collected thousands of images this past summer to prepare for this exhibition.
Linda Finn's work is known to Sudbury audiences but this is the Elliot Lake artist's first major show at AGS. She collects objects on her walks in the woods or along the beach and has assembled twigs, rocks, shells, and bones to say something about the North. Many are mounted on handmade paper and are displayed to mimic primitive writings.
Viewers can read into them what they want, she says.
"These constructions invite contemplation and closer scrutiny by the viewer, echoing my feeling that the natural world is a sacred place," Finn says in her artistic statement.
Finn assembled a series of black and white images of magnified pieces of various rock specimens she found in a geology textbook, for her work titled Mineral Textures. The panels are one of the signature works of the exhibit. Mineral Textures complements Browning's work in that again the viewer can appreciate Mother Nature's abstract paintings.
About 150 attended the opening of Finn's and Browning's exhibition last Saturday. A parallel exhibition of Sudbury artists is being held on the second floor of the gallery titled Local Colour.
Igneous Corpus was curated by Celeste Scopelites before she left the gallery to accept at position in Peterborough. The AGS has recently appointed Karen Tait-Peacock as the new director of the Gallery and has promoted Krysta Telenko, formerly curatorial assistant, to the position of curator.
Igneous Corpus continues at the Art Gallery of Sudbury until March 1.
