Glissements de terrain (Land Slides)

Glissements de terrain (Land Slides) presents recently produced bodies of works by Vancouver artist Ryan Mathieson and Quebec City artist Anne-Marie Proulx. The exhibition looks at how subjective mapping and framing processes modulate the representation of given territories. In their individual practices, Mathieson and Proulx engage the discrepancies between representation-as-index and representation-as-deferral, and the artists’ material and compositional manipulations produce inflexions in the reading of photographic images. The exhibition, in its configuration, furthers this translation process and becomes a space of percolation: more than echoing each other, the works become porous. Slippages and infiltrations create (unstable) grounds for the expansion of the works’ physical and relational frames.

Exhibited works present fragmented renderings of landscapes: Icelandic and Southwestern American deserts, the Gulf Islands of British Columbia, the Magdalen Islands and the Côte-Nord Region of Quebec. Here, an interplay between indexical and non-indexical representation engenders the loss—or translation—of information pertaining to the depicted territories. This gives way to the artists’ reinterpretation of chosen sites through visual, material, and textual means. Mathieson presents a collection of photographic and assemblage-based works, notably exhibiting microscopic imagery and documentation of collected seaweed specimens from the Gulf Islands, as well as a series of landscape compositions that testify to processes of topographical projection. Proulx presents series of works examining the geographic, human, and idiosyncratic topologies of insularity found along and into the Gulf of the Saint Lawrence River. Playing with the viewer’s perception of space and scale, the artist approaches singularities of Québécois landscapes as conduits to open the very notion of territorial recording.