The Field of Appearances
The Field of Appearances
Trianon Gallery, Lethbridge, Alberta.
November 7 –January 24th, 2015
Kendra Wallace is a Montréal artist living in France. Her studies were at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, and University of Québec at Montréal for her MA.
This exhibition presents Wallace’s work with the barley field and the flower garden, two examples of a poignantly simple artistic subject in which intimacy and innocence are summoned. Wallace’s interventions into her camera have become itself a gesture just like these tall flowers in wind; it’s accurate lens put out of play, showing flowers as simple streams of their individual colour and light rigorously shaped as “minimalist” monochrome rectangles.
“My practice and my relationship with photography are born out of wanting to be free to the experience of seeing and being with things, to find connection, especially with nature and landscape without consuming it. I’m interested in how the camera looks at things/see’s things, in comparison with how we perceive and see things experientially. When I was looking at flowers I realized that I also see a radiating field of colour floating above or around the flower. The floating layer is what I was trying to make contact with. I remember wanting to get closer to this colour and focus as well on the felt experience of being with the flowers, which was not an image or a thought. I wanted to share their presence and see them more than I could with the camera. I removed my camera lens and floated the body of the camera right in with the flowers. I did this daily over a period of several months as they and the weather and season changed. I hoped for the photographs to be un-fixed, more of a flow or fluctuation. In the case of the barley fields the camera lens is floating over the camera body. I wanted a pictorial scene to be with the flower monochromes so that people could place themselves in landscape”.
Kendra Wallace has exhibited in Canada, Germany and France and is represented by Galerie des Marches, France.