Elevating what is often taken for granted in the world around us, this sampling of creative projects explores relationships between the natural and built environment through the structuring of sites and experiences.


Canupy: Achilles Shadow is a garden planted with sapling trees

Canupy: Achilles Shadow

Elision

Elision

Around The  Block

Around The Block

Livelihoond

Livelihood

Reverberation: Niagara Here

Reverberations


Worth Having

Worth Having

Bower

Bower

Situ:Performing Narrative Images

Situ:Performing Narrative Images

Fluid Envelope

Fluid Envelope


Other Bodies of Work

Other Bodies of Work

Canupy: Achilles Shadow

Canupy: Achilles Shadow

Canupy: Achilles Shadow was a garden of 500 native tree saplings that also acted as an orphanage for trees and a platform for tree rescue. This collection of unwanted trees was planted in the branching pattern of an 18 m maple.  Ultimately the orphan trees were adopted and replanted where they continue to flourish and contribute to the regeneration of the urban forest. This project was installed at Canadensis Botanical Garden, Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa for two season - 2016 and 2017.  

Canupy was inspired by Achilles Shadow  1972 sculpture by Brian Newman borrowed from Canada Council Art Bank and sited nearby. Like a fallen construction sign, it reminds us that - from antiquity to the present - human greed is our collective fatal flaw.  We forget that nature is waiting to take back the earth.

Canupy Drawings

Elision

Elision
Elision uses 3D modeling software to merge engineered and natural structures. It borrows the fluid logic of organic systems and to entangle everyday objects of city infrastructure. As large-scale prints (2015) this work begs for display in relation to architecture, where it counters the spectator's orientation in space.

Around The Block

Around The Block

Around the Block is a multi-channel video and audio environment that enacts common realities of the street – where the culture of privatization and disconnection is evidenced by restricted space with obstructed views. Our ears are more liberated than our eyes. Part image montage, part video/audio immersive environment, Around the Block (2012) flows through three videos wrapping the walls are derived from a series of still image collaged into seamless looping panoramas. In the videos we see people composited into the video stroll by – sometimes curious about what lies beyond their view. All the while, spatialized sound enriches the texture and syntax of our urban experience.

Livelihood

Livelihood

Livelihood combines still images, video and sound in an interactive installation that invites embodied exploration of the texture and syntax of the sub/urban environment. It distills and disrupts unremarkable places shaped by the economics of "automobility". The central components of Livelihood are panoramic still images that, in the large-scale image projection, are looped and controlled by an interactive system that enables the viewer/participant to – through their own movement - create a seamless and fluid parade of places, people and things. Here the viewer activates the scene and literally brings the world alive by walking.  The viewer controls the passing scene/projection and causes hidden images and audio content to emerge in response to their proximity, pace and position. Iterations (2008-12) of Livelihood expand the this work in a variety of ways including with vinyl wall murals that present life-size urban infrastructure and objects that reflect the passing scene.

Reverberations

Reverberations: Niagara Here

Smithville, Ontario – today a quiet exurban town in the middle of the Niagara Peninsula - was once a bustling railway hub for agricultural freight and passenger traffic. Reverberations is a smartphone application (2012) designed to enhance the experience of visitors to the town’s historic railway station. It provides digitally collaged images that distill the station’s archive into thematic groupings along with the components from which they are constructed. This project is part of a series of alternative reality projects presented across the Niagara region.

Worth Having

Worth Having

Worth Having is a series of digitally collaged images that bring together objects selected from the artist’s collections.  Seeking to find purpose and new meaning in material possessions, individual curiosities are singled out and re-contextualized in juxtaposition with 19th century stylized stone carvings of flora and fauna by sculptor and architect, Calvert Vaux.  Each collage is organized in circular reliquary-like arrangements that create concentric sets of reference where human control of nature is a unifying theme. Iterations of this work were produced between 2008 and 2012.

Bower

Bower

Bower is six digital prints that are designed to link end-to-end to create an endless frieze-like continuum. The work (2000-2002) is based upon photographs of the stylized stone carvings of Calvert Vaux in Central Park, New York City which depict a harmonious and peaceful natural utopia. Bower doubles and twists the fine geometry of Vaux’s stone arbour into a roiling challenge to good order with the inclusion of unwelcome elements like fences, rubble, utility poles and vines.

Situ: Performing Narrative Images

Situ: Performing Narrative Images

Situ: Performing Narrative Images is a series of constructed digital images created in collaboration with Marlene Moser. This work (2004) explore show stories coalesce around simple narrative elements and how narrative discourse and authorship arise from a collective process.  Groups of actors were asked to form tableaux vivant based on historical artworks.  Then, working together, each group devised a narrative moment before and after the central tableau.  Photographs of these, along with text derived from the actors’ discussion were woven together to provide a larger narrative in images that can be assembled in various sequences and looped in a continuum.

Fluid Envelope

Fluid Envelope

Fluid Envelope is a series of paintings – the largest of which is 213 cm x 76  –  that grows out of an interest in space as a location in culture. The notion of fluidity – suspension in the changeable, enveloping medium of water is central to the work. In this fluid context, people and objects float in the control of (or in resistance to) larger forces defined by nature and culture.  This work (1993-1996) was also produced as an interactive multimedia project with images, text, video and music. The Fluid Envelope exhibited in solo and curated exhibitions across Canada.

Other Bodies of Work