Reinhard Reitzenstein - Ecologies of Landscape

Artists: Tacita Dean, Bonnie Devine, Olafur Eliasson, Isabelle Hayeur, Shelley Niro, James Nizam, Reinhard Reitzenstein, Simon Starling, Paul Walde

Curated by Mark A. Cheetham

Barbara Edwards Contemporary
BEC Project Space
315 Kings Street West, 2nd Floor
Toronto, Ontario M5V 1J5

November 10 - January 26, 2019
Opening Reception: Friday, November 10, 6–9pm
Curator Remarks: 7pm

Gallery Hours: Weds - Sat, 1–5pm (or by appointment)

T 647 878 4444

For more information, contact:
barbara@becontemporary.com

Ecologies of Landscape challenges us to reconsider what art and artists can contribute to the ecological future of the Earth, what 'being terrestrial' means for each of us. British European artist Tacita Dean photographs the stunning oddities of Madagascan Baobab trees. Bonnie Devine's Radiation and Radiance drawings and Canoe: to the North Shore narrate the discovery of uranium near Elliot Lake in the Algoma region of northern Ontario and its impact on the Anishinaabe Ojibwa of the Serpent River First Nation, to which she belongs. Documenting a rock on an Icelandic glacier from all sides, Olafur Eliasson's photo series The small glacier surfer sets the long game of geological change against the time it takes for a human being to move around an object. Isabelle Hayeur disrupts the seductive beauty of conventional underwater photography with a troubling image of Spirogyra - a plant that thrives on pollutants left by humans - photographed in Québec's Eastern Townships. Reflecting on the horrors of missing and murdered Indigenous women, Shelley Niro's photographs recall landscape photography in a familiar role, that of nature as a refuge from a violent human world. James Nizam employs the magic of the camera obscura to create two still images focusing our gaze on that most fundamental diurnal phenomenon, the rising and setting of the sun. Reinhard Reitzenstein's meticulous 'text' drawings of trees intone a profound reverence for these arboreal beings. British artist Simon Starling's digital video and stills titled Project for a Rift Valley Crossing - set in the Dead Sea area of the Middle East - hypnotically involve us in the material and conceptual dimensions of our interactions with land and water. Paul Walde's video Tom Thomson Centennial Swim returns to a regional obsession about landscape art and the land, commemorating Thomson's mysterious death on Canoe Lake in 1917.