Bettina Harvey and Judy E. Witheford: Drift

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Bettina Harvey, "Drift 2," 2019

graphite on paper, 12" x 20"

OPENING RECEPTION Tuesday, March 17, 6–8 p.m.

MEET THE ARTISTS Saturday, March 21, 2–3 p.m.

The Ferry Building Gallery is pleased to present Drift, an exhibition that showcases drawings and mixed-media by Bettina Harvey and photography by Judy E. Witheford. Thematically, the complimentary works of these two artists explore perceptions and impressions of the natural world and the visual imprints, fragments and remnants that embody the passage of time.

The drawings of Bettina Harvey in the Drift series are renderings of the natural world and operate as metaphors for her experiences with her father’s journey through dementia. After he was diagnosed with dementia, Harvey accompanied him for walks along the beaches of Denman Island, where he carefully selected pieces of driftwood as gifts for his daughter. Much like her father’s mind, the driftwood seemed impermanent and fragile—the substance of a past about to disappear. The pieces had been part of something whole and, through travel from forest to sea to beach, were shaped by a lifetime of experience.

For her subjects, she selects only branch attachments or tree collars, nodes of wood that express connection, attachment and growth. The drawings in the Drift collection evoke the human anatomy—overlapping tissues that resist the process of decay. The focus on the wood demonstrates direct acknowledgment of the ideas of aging and degeneration, processes our culture frequently avoids. In this way, Drift offers an homage to age; it marks a refusal to allow the elderly or the process of aging to drift away into obscurity.

Judy E. Witheford is a photographer who is both fascinated and frustrated by the abstraction of image-making. Freezing a moment in time and space, framing it, giving it importance over the endless flow of moments, she hopes to create a coherent record of the dynamic exchange between the photographer, the moment in the world and the image being made.

She describes approaching the elemental force of this vast waterfall and feeling compelled to capture the experience—to freeze its immensity. And, yet, recognizing that by suspending the moment, it would become an increasingly fixed concept, something solidified and separate, no longer an ever-changing reality.

Witheford states that her photographs are not self-expression, nor do they carry a message. They are simply the embodied result of this immersive process, using the camera as a vehicle to engage in an active response to the encounter.