Place Markers: Mapping Locations and Probing Boundaries

OPENING RECEPTION Thursday 30 August at 8 PM

PANEL DISCUSSION Sunday 16 September at 2 PM
Featuring participating artists: James Geurts (Melbourne, Australia), collaborators Ellen Moffat (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan) and Kim Morgan (Halifax, Nova Scotia), Evamaria Trischak (Vienna, Austria)

Many critical theorists have investigated how artists make or define places of cultural significance through the production of objects that inhabit, or images that frame, the landscape. Place Markers brings together works in which the artists use the landscape-or location-to frame the art, by marking precise PLACES and geographic coordinates on the earth through photographic means or with multimedia tools such as Global Positioning Satellites (GPS), Google Earth and other digital mapping systems. In pinpointing specific locations or mapping travels through territory, these artists probe multiple boundaries inherent in each site to generate new and expanded visual representations of social and geo-political space.

This exhibition presents work in a variety of media, including photography, video projection, multimedia installation, web-based digital media and a kinetic light sculpture, by Ron Benner (London, Ontario), James Geurts(Melbourne, Australia), Jeff Thomas (Ottawa, Ontario),Evamaria Trischak (Vienna, Austria), and Andrea Wollensak (New London, Connecticut) and collaborative projects by Gwen MacGregor and Sandra Rechico(Toronto, Ontario), and Ellen Moffat (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan) and Kim Morgan (Halifax, Nova Scotia). Projects track political and cultural lines defined by contested ideas of nationhood; others home in on GPS coordinates that delineate urban territories or define shifting tidal lines in the fluid zone between land and sea. Yet others are cultural spaces mapped through photographic and video conversations that span the globe.

It is fitting that Place Markers was initiated by Peter Dykhuis after meeting James Geurts and Evamaria Trischak in 2008 at a conference in Vienna, Austria (titledArt and Cartography - Cartography and Art), and is the culmination of multiple conversations with many artists over the years, including participants of a panel session at the 2009 annual conference of the College Art Association in Los Angeles. In the rapidly evolving landscape of geo-telemetry, the Gallery will revisit this field of art practice in 2014 in a related exhibition co-curated with Halifax based artist, curator and educator Robert Bean; it will present locative work by artists whose projects (will) exist solely in the digital realm.

Support for James Geurts was provided by:

Support for Evamaria Trischak was provided by: