Laura St. Pierre: Spectral Garden

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Laura St. Pierre, "Spectral Garden," 2018

Opening Reception: Friday, July 6 at 8pm.Artist Talk: Friday, July 6 at 7pm

For the last decade, Laura St. Pierre has created installation, photo and time-based works that question how we live in our cities and on the planet. Since returning to Saskatchewan in 2013, St. Pierre has been struck by the poor air quality that residents of Saskatoon experience due to the forest fires that have been raging in the Western Boreal Forest each summer. For weeks at a time, residents can smell the forest burning: the odour is a powerful reminder of how this ecosystem is changing. In response, she began to collect plant specimens from the Boreal Forest near Jan Lake, SK, close to her family’s cabin. Since her last visit, this area has also been ravaged by fires, a fact that resonates as she works in the studio.

St. Pierre's current project, Spectral Garden, involves collecting and preserving flora from these changing landscapes. Using a technique common to botanists, the plants are preserved in isopropyl alcohol. This maintains their three-dimensional form, but leeches the colour from their flowers and leaves. Unlike a seed or a cutting, these tissues cannot be used to create new life. Instead, they preserve a moment in time and space. Until now, these carefully preserved plants have been the subject of a series of photographs. Re-envisioning this work for PAVED Arts, St. Pierre has created a four-channel HD video projection that uses her earlier work as a jumping off point, before, quite literally, setting it on fire. Immersive and otherworldly, the project continues St. Pierre’s exploration of our relationship to the natural world, through a flickering glow of firelight.

Artist Bio: Laura St. Pierre’s installations, sculptures, public works and photography have been exhibited throughout Canada and abroad. St. Pierre earned undergraduate degrees at UBC and the U of A, and completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at Concordia University in Montreal. She has received arts grants from the Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Quebec, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Canada Council. Exhibitions in 2018 include “Winter Garden” at VivianeArt (Calgary), “The Museum of Future History” and the Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina), “La vie fragile” (Montreal), and a new video project at PAVED Arts (Saskatoon) as part of the Roadside Attractions series developed by the the Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina).