ec·o·tone/ˈekəˌtōn,ˈēkəˌtōn/
Exhibition Dates: September 27th to October 9th
Artist pARTy - Saturday September 30th from 6 to 8 pm
Featuring artworks by
Julya Hajnoczky - Photographer
Lydia Miller- Fibre Art Weaver
Thresholds are concentrated spaces often rich with energy and metamorphosis. Ecotone offers an intimate investigation of the communities formed within the boundaries of ecological and human crossovers.
Julya Hajnoczky Artist Statement
In 2017 my art practice changed forever. With a small arts grant from Calgary Arts Development, I built my tiny teardrop trailer, a combination camper and workspace, the Mobile Natural History Collection Laboratory (affectionately nicknamed the Alfresco Science Machine). Since then I’ve been travelling around Canada, studying and documenting the varied ecosystems from places like Haida Gwaii to Pacific Rim, Wood Buffalo and Grasslands National Parks and everywhere in between.
This project examines human relationships with the natural world and how ecosystems are changing in our current era by imagining and creating possible near-futures and future landscapes. Adopting and adapting the practices of scientific investigators, I collect specimens following ethical foraging practices from natural environments, based on my own research and consultation with scientists and lay experts. Using a high-resolution scanner as my camera, the specimens collected from each site are arranged together on the glass, composing intimate portraits of ecosystems.
The images are elegiac, dark, mourning, representing not contemporary specimens but rather, recontextualized, some last remaining pieces of a fragmented world, floating in the void, evoking a sort of future nostalgia. I use photography’s singular ability to freeze time to direct the viewer’s deep attention to the rich details and intricacies of natural ecosystems, but also to provoke questions about our species’ seemingly insatiable drive to take, to possess, to bend the natural world into human form. We are all complicit, even I, an artist who seeks to cast a most tender gaze upon the world.
Lydia Miller is a fiber artist who examines our place and our conditioned ideas of hierarchy in the living world. Nature is her abundant muse, vast and ever changing, it teaches her the magic and knowledge of these ecosystems.
Through her site-specific 3D weavings made of foraged natural fibers, she contributes to the reconstruction of how we think, interact, and exist with and within nature. Moreover, she intends to instill a responsibility to the environments which sustain us by deepening both our physical and spiritual connection with the magnified organic matter.
“In the end, I want to contribute to the mending of humans’ relationship to nature. To understand how minimal, yet still integral, our role as a species is. We can no longer center ourselves and our needs as if we are superior to the fungis, the trees, and everything in between.” - Lydia Miller