The works in cover the taken bone are made with mediums found close at hand: primers and paints from the hardware store and industrial oils for machinery. Dunn works with repurposed brushes, tools and natural implements that have roles in other aspects of farm labour. Drawing from the impulses of arte povera, she seeks to work economically and directly with informal materials and procedures.

The visual narrative of the Pacific Northwest’s climate is cool and desaturated. When watched and felt closely, subtle variations in temperature and tonality reveal themselves. Dunn has an affinity for grisaille, or achromatic, painting and tempers her palette to reflect the muted atmosphere. She often paints on both sides of the canvas, creating a wet, saturated surface that reveals stains from the marks made on the obverse plane.

The region’s dampness and darkness accelerates decay, but also regeneration. Many of the paintings featured in the exhibition have been exposed to the weather and worked with natural matter such as soil, leaves, sand, gravel, bark mulch and straw. These processes imbue the works with traces of the seasonal events that accompany their emergence, becoming visual stories of  natural and social time. 

Notes: The exhibition borrows its title from Verne Bright’s poem “Good Soil,” published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, January 1936, 187, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=21083.

Wendell Berry, “The Work of Local Culture” (1988), in The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (Berkley, CA: Counterpoint, 2017), 102.

In her poem “las islas / the islands,” Cuban poet Reina Maria Rodriguez observes that the physical and psychic landscapes of islands and their residents are entwined. An island’s topography is akin to a floating body, and both bear the stains of atmospheric and social weather. Rodriguez explores how an island’s isolation creates a unique spatial and temporal experience for those who inhabit them, that is distinct from places and people that are from away.

At a distance, the caves on Mona Island resemble portals. Up close, they are places of contact, evidenced by the presence of cross-cultural art and tools dating back millennia, and epochs of plant and mineral life. The form and concept of a portal as a threshold of encounter resonates with Aponte. She has split her time between Bayamón, Puerto Rico, and Vancouver, Canada, since 2021, and her new work is informed by her passage between the two places. Her time spent in the Pacific Northwest’s temperate climate resonates in the paintings’ grey-toned ground, which subdues the vivid palette conjured by the Caribbean tropics.

The works in Sensitized bear witness to variable conditions on the land: from dewy sunrises to vivid sunsets, wildfire haze, threatening winds and miraculous rain. The exhibition features a series of cyanotypes and anthotypes, two forms of impressions made by exposing photosensitive emulsions to ultraviolet light. Willard made her anthotype base from blended wenéx, sesép and elderberries. The images feature local plants and photographs that Willard took of historical Interior Salish baskets (1870–1910) in the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff, Alberta. The resulting prints express the resilience of natural and cultural life under environmental pressures exacerbated by colonialism and capitalism.

Sensitized also features a series of concrete poems the artist made with her youngest son by squishing, smearing and squeezing Oregon grape berries onto paper. Like the anthotype base, the berry’s juice is photosensitive and changes hue when exposed to sunlight and oxidizes. Many of Willard’s artworks continue to be sensitive to environmental elements after their completion. Unlike a photograph, which captures a specific moment in time, Willard views these works as “a moment of life on the land extends outward like a ripple in a pond embracing generations of interrelated life in an assertion of Indigenous futurity.”

During the 2023 Bush Creek East fire, Willard’s family and community were put on evacuation alert. They packed their belongings into blue Rubbermaid bins and relocated them to her studio in nearby Chase. Situated among piles of cedar roots, baskets made by Secwépemc Elders and family and photographs of her ancestor’s baskets, the bins resonated as vessels for aiding mobility in crisis and as safe repositories for one’s belongings. The resilience of Salish basketry is expressed in two sculptures with stitching patterns that she learned from master Secwépemc artist Delores Purdaby. A large-scale drawing of an Interior Salish cedar bark basket (1890–1910), held in the collection of the Whyte Museum, is featured in the gallery window.

The intensification of fire weather has various effects on the earth's metabolism: it disrupts photosynthesis when smoke obscures the sun, constricts respiration with high levels of particulates, and dysregulates cognition and motor function due to excessive heat. People are experiencing heightened sensitivity to these conditions, and yet appear desensitized to the economic and political forces that precipitate them. Willard ’s methodology calls for sensitizing on a broad scale. The cyanotype Future Prayers, is a sequence of prints made of tobacco leaves that she grew from seeds that were harvested at daphne, an Indigenous artist-run centre in Tiohtià:ke/ Mooniyang/ Montreal, Québec. Willard cures bundles of the tobacco leaves alongside the garlic in her root shed. The tobacco will be used for future offerings and prayers for the lives, homes and wildlife impacted by wildfires.

In the studio, Nicole Ondre uses the phenomenon of prime knots as a departure point to explore the temporality of clay. Parallel to the topological strategies of stretching, bending and distorting forms in order to analyze their composition, she manipulates extruded clay loops in ways that test the medium’s resilience. In topology, the negative space surrounding a knot offers equally valuable insight about its logic. Ondre is attentive to how the installation of the works expresses the effects of gravity and compression, elevation and extension on the loops.

The artist’s interest in this procedure evolves from a long-term curiosity about the materials and processes of painting. Her early experiments include making paper prints of oil paintings that she inscribed directly on the wall and floor. She then began sculpting swaths of pliable tissue soaked in acrylic medium into drapes and bows. The absence of a standard support structure in these works inspired site-specific installations in which fabric sutures and clay studs puncture gallery walls. Ondre’s study of stitch formations piqued her interest in textile patterns, which she started modeling in clay. She initially painted them with oil paints before experimenting with ceramic glazing. These complex and delicate compositions were advanced by her discovery of mathematical knots and her research into firing and glazing methods.

The exhibition’s title Primes—in the plural—draws attention away from the value of a single material or procedure and toward the multiple influences that inform a studio methodology. It highlights the primacy of formal experimentation, and the role that time plays in shaping emergent discoveries into mature iterations.