Scroll down for Images, Videos, & Artist Statements from the Exhibition

Virtual Gallery Walkthrough

Andrea Gorda
Regrounded

Residing in Inglis, MB, Andrea Gorda began photographing local community events and people. Her art practice has developed from that photography and also from creating textile goods with botanical dyes and blockprinting.

Approaching her practice primarily from a photographic experience, Andrea earnestly delved into acrylics in late 2018. There, she found a medium that was accessible, and started by painting the subject matter of choice from her youth, horses.

This ongoing series of acrylic paintings is part of a larger, ongoing project to document individuals within landscapes. Choosing pasture riders and ranchers as a main subject as they are both a recognizable icon, an increasingly isolated and maligned demographic and as a central point of conversation in land management as determined by climate change, Andrea has travelled through western Manitoba and eastern Saskatchewan. Her photographs strive to bring the intricacies of the soil, plant and animal community dynamics forward, by highlighting existing management strategies, primarily within the community pasture network. Andrea was raised within the rural urban interface of small acreages and chooses to approach the subject matter as an outsider, attempting to keep an outsiders viewpoint to better engage others in conversation about how our individual choices affect community and land health. She questions the value of maintaining and/or increasing individuality at the cost of community and land health.

Her painting works explore the simultaneous nature of herd and the individual organism. Motivated by the land we live on and depend on, and the need for a settling into that connection, Andrea Gorda explores the idea of connection to group, an underlying dependency on each other, the thought of being part of a collective while expressing individual direction.

Her paintings seeks to express isolation within a larger whole and how separateness and disconnection to grounding foundation of community and land can be startling and questionable for the benefit of the whole. She plays with and questions the idea of individuality, the disconnect between urban and rural Manitoba. She acknowledges the patronizing attitudes that can arise across the breadth of this spectrum and their impacts on land and land health She proposes embracing integration between individuals, between individuals and communities and both individuals, communities and the land.

Anne Klassen
Wildlife

Whether it’s a bald eagle soaring through the blue sky, a wold running across a frozen snow-wovered lake, or three tiny black bear cubs scrambling up a tree, the breathtaking photo opportunities of Riding Mountain National Park are second to none. Anne Klassen’s passion lies in tracking down different forms of wildlife for the perfect photo opportunity.

Twenty years ago, Klassen got into photography as a hobby. Klassen stops in to Riding Mountain year round, visiting her favourite remote locations. One may often find the photographer dressed in camouflage and sitting in a blind for hours on end, or tracking subjects much like a hunter, although the only shooting going on is through the lens of a camera.

Klassen feels that wildlife protection is essential, because once the animal is gone, it will be impossible to study and learn from them. Unfortunately, a lot of wildlife has disappeared from the earth do to human activities. Klassen feels it is her duty to make others aware of this, expressing her point of view through breathtaking photographs.

“Only if we understand, can we care. Only if we care, we will help. Only if we help, we shall be saved.”
-Jane Goodall.

Melanie Barnett
Detritus

[dəˈtrīdəs]
Noun
1. A product of disintegration, destruction, or wearing away.
2. Ecology: non-living organic matter, including leaves, animal remains, and feces, which falls into soil or bodies of water to then be broken down by decomposers and detritivores.

Detritus foreshadows humanity’s fate in the context of the climate crisis. Mosses, liverworts, and fungi – all ancient organisms that have lived far longer than we can imagine – consume human figures in grotesque, fantastical ways, reducing them to a state of detritus. The figures beg the question of our fate amidst a collapsing environment: perhaps an untimely death to humanity is closer to destiny than it is to destruction – maybe that is what it means to be human.

Beginning within the body, the spores of these ancient organisms take root in the host’s lungs, eventually spreading to other organs by way of the blood stream. Referencing the speed and severity at which the climate crisis affects our world, the moss, liverworts, and fungi erupt from the figures in a solemn beauty, releasing new spores which will go on to infect other hosts at an exponentially increasing rate.

I am interested in the permanence of ceramic: the works in Detritus will continue to live for thousands of years after my death. They are, compared to the average human life span, immortal. In a conceptual push and pull between the permanent and the temporary, I have used ceramics and works on paper to comment on the lasting impact that humanity has had on the environment. Forever is a long time, and the ceramic works will tell our contemporary story for generations to come, while the works on paper mirror humanity’s mortality. For too long, humanity has chosen to ignore the damage that we have caused the planet, and as a consequence to our own inaction, one day we shall pay the ultimate price.