Dorothy Cross, David Zink Yi, Fiona Bowie, Sonia Hedstrand, Troy Morgan, Terry Kerby, Zarh Pritchard, The Laboratory of Marine Obscuriosity and Spectaculars
March 14–April 22, 2012
Charles H. Scott Gallery
Emily Carr University of Art and Design
1399 Johnston Street, Vancouver, BC
T +1 604 844.3809
The Charles H. Scott Gallery is pleased to present The Voyage, or Three Years at Sea Part III featuring the work of Dorothy Cross, David Zink Yi, Fiona Bowie, Sonia Hedstrand, Troy Morgan, Terry Kerby, Zarh Pritchard, and The Laboratory of Marine Obscuriosity and Spectaculars. The exhibition is the third in a multi-part series about the sea. While the first two exhibitions focused on lighthouses and ill-fated voyages, this instalment is about what is below the water’s surface.
Irish artist Dorothy Cross has a strong affinity for the sea and its creatures. Her video Jellyfish Lake, depicts a woman floating amid the millions of ghostly jellyfish that migrate daily across a marine lake in Palau. Like Cross, David Zink Yi, a Peruvian-born artist, has made a number of works about sea creatures specifically cephalopods such as giant squid or the Octopus sculpture which is included in The Voyage. On the opposite end of the scale are the microscopic organisms that are studied by The Laboratory of Marine Obscuriosity and Spectaculars—the Marine Zoology and Botany lab headed by Brian Leander at the University of British Columbia. A series of images captured through electron microscopy will be exhibited including a newly discovered organism found in Vancouver’s English Bay.
Since 2010, Fiona Bowie has been documenting the underwater life of Vancouver’s False Creek through her project Surface. The Voyage will include a version of this and play off the Charles H. Scott’s close proximity to the subaquatic environ represented in Bowie’s work. Terry Kerby is Chief Submersible Pilot for the Hawaii Undersea Research Labs manned submersible program. In recent years he has been painting the scenes he encounters during his deep-sea dives, a selection of which will be in the exhibition. Ama, the Japanese women that have free-dived for centuries in search of abalone and seaweed are the subject of Swedish filmmaker Sonia Hedstrand’s video installation Ama-san. A way of life dying out in large part due to pollution and overfishing, Hedstrand’s work documents three generations of women from the same family who are some of the last to make a living as Ama.
Troy Morgan is an artist and animator working in Los Angeles. He has created a body of work entitled Beneath the Sea about the obsession to collect, contain and possess underwater life forms. A series of his watercolours and sculptures will be presented in The Voyage. A desire to fully engage the subaquatic world he encountered drove Zarh Pritchard (1866–1956) to develop methods that would allow him to paint underwater rather than from memory. Wearing a diving helmet Pritchard would sit at his easel and depict scenes from the coast of Scotland to Tahiti. Three of these paintings will be part of the exhibition.
The Voyage, or Three Years at Sea Part III is curated by Cate Rimmer.
For more information please contact the gallery at 604 844 3809.
Gallery hours are 12–5 weekdays and 10–5 weekends. Admission is free.