Drawing Series
Passages (2016-2019)
Description
This set of drawings were made in preparation for the development of paintings - Passages series. They were exhibited at the Vorres Museum in 2019.
Acknowledgements
The project was supported by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture and Creativity (USask) and the International Centre (USask)
Dust (2015)
Description
Dust builds on the topic of home, in which I previously addressed in Catalyst and Tertium Quid. This collection of drawings was initiated during an artist residency at Joya: AiR in the Spanish national park of Sierra María-Los Vélez, Europe’s most arid region. Historically occupied by farmers, the area’s residents built complex irrigation systems to maintain crops including many orchards of almond trees. With climate change, increasingly less rainfall has led to sparse vegetation and increasing desertification. Consequently, the region’s residents either abandon or rarely occupy their homes. Several abandoned homes were new and shared a likeness to ancient Roman or Grecian architectural ruins. To capture this timelessness, I sketched on site and used traditional materials - graphite, pencil, and carbon.
Tertium Quid (2016)
Description
The title of the exhibition, Tertium Quid, refers to montage theory – an unidentified third element that results when combining two known ones. In the early twentieth century, tertium quid described innovations in film editing, specifically when film director Sergei Eisenstein applied his montage theory in Battleship Potemkin (1925). To create the Odessa Staircase scene, Eisenstein combined both focused and zoomed-out viewpoints to elongate the perception of time. He then sped up or slowed down these shots to generate intensity. Many scenes focused on the faces of the protagonists, offering the audience an immediate emotional connection to the characters. These techniques continue to be applied in motion film and have been expanded to other artistic mediums such as illustration, animation, and graphic novels.
Tertium Quid combines thirty-five preparation sketches from both Catalyst and The Human Animal addressing the topics of home, contaminated land, the environment, and human behavior. Titled Tertium Quid, the series was inspired by montage theory, because its installation included juxtapositions and framing devices to generate a sense of time. In placing one image with another, my aim was to provoke viewers to engage with each symbolic, metaphoric sign to complete the continuum of the story.