MAIN SPACE EXHIBITION
FEBRUARY 11 – MARCH 5, 1994
RECEPTION: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 1994 AT 8 PM

LOCATION – STRIDE GALLERY
722, 11 AVE S.W, CALGARY, ALBERTA

EXHIBITION INFORMATION

Landscape is the site where our post-colonial notions of a mythologized nature collide headlong with the evidence our impact has made on the landscape itself. Millard is shifting through this ground. Aesthetic conventions are picked up and put in contrary order to their traditional role in the history of landscape painting.

EXHIBITION TEXT

My work explores our paradoxical relationship with the landscape,. I am interested in representing the complex process of perceiving the landscape by creating the multiple and overlapping views which reflect the different ways we see the land. Important to these ideas in the work are the stenciled trace, the indexical sign, and the fragmented view. By layering modes of representation; the illusionary, the actual and the indexical, different ways of conveying aspects of the landscape experienced are brought together.

I treat the surfact as both window and tableaux. The wood and paper surfaces on which I work hold the illusions of space within them, the trace of objects stenciled on them, and found objects adhered to them. Items which have been collected from the landscape; bark, beer bottle caps, fluorescent tape, wooden wedges cut in the process of tree falling, etc., are glued onto or set into the surfaces. Spraying through branches and boughs, and around objects such as survey sticks and rocks, the negative imprint of these objects remains. Scrapes, cuts, and burn marks into the thin surfaces of the wood and paper echoes the fragility of the origin of the support.

While an interest in critical theory informs my approach, the motivation for my work is rooted in my personal experience of landscape. I spent much of my childhood in and around the Banff area and developed an early fascination with how the landscape is viewed, ordered and valued differently on either side of a Park line. I am drawn to places where the “natural” landscape borders that marked for industry. My working process combines the objects I collect from the landscape and the drawings I do on site with the images which stem from the memories of places.

The grids and frames through which we see and measure the landscape’s value, and the viewer’s perspective and scale in relation to these issues are the ideas explored in my work. By rerouting expectations of what landscape images depict I am interested in describing a space between the marked sites of desire and consumption

-Laura Millard, Feb. 1994

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