Laura Findlay: The Necromancer’s Garden
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Norberg Hall 333B 36 Avenue SE, Calgary, Alberta T2G 1W2
Laura Findlay, "Neck and Neck," 2021
oil on canvas, 22" x 30"
Norberg Hall is pleased to present The Necromancer’s Garden, an exhibition of new paintings by Toronto based artist Laura Findlay.
Working primarily in painting, Findlay’s recent projects generate fragmented natural worlds as an arena to collide occasions of metaphysical and ephemeral knowledge. Through an ecology of mark-making employing additive and subtractive processes, her paintings ravel generative and destructive events as a site for cultivation.
“Midway through Rebecca Solnit’s new book, Orwell’s Roses, is a chapter on gardensand enclosures. “A garden is an ideal version of nature filtered through a particular culture,” she writes, “whether it’s as formal as a Japanese rock and sand garden or anIslamic paradise garden with a central fountain—or as haphazard as a lot of ordinaryprivate gardens are, arising as they do from limited space, time, budget, and planning.” Solnit continues, “A garden is what you want (and can manage and afford), and whatyou want is who you are, and who you are is always a political and cultural question.”
That’s a fundamental perspective worth keeping in mind when considering Laura Findlay’s latest gathering of paintings, The Necromancer’s Garden. Ranging in size and scale with varying placements on the gallery walls, Findlay’s paintings capture fragments of a cultivated natural order in flux. It’s a framework of renewal, adaptation, fragility, resilience—a nested clutch of robin’s eggs, the sprouting buds of a rose bush in bloom, the fruit-laden branches of an apple tree, the dusk silhouette of a spider’s web—rendered in the hard-flash chiaroscuro of Findlay’s photographic references.
There’s an undeniable sense of beauty and pleasure here, but something more intimate and complex lurks beneath the surface. Gardens are, after all, also sites of memory: from season to season, year to year, a garden’s rhythm—its inherent generative impulse of growth and decay—is at once determined by but also extends beyond a “natural order.” Any one of Findlay’s tightly cropped, snapshot views, meticulously composed through an additive/subtractive balance of applying then selectively thinning pigments, offer fleeting narrative cues where the personal and, if Solnit is right, the political and cultural converge. This is the garden as allegory, a conjuror’s inventory of memento mori, of choices made and not made, where what is gained and what is lost is for each of us as unpredictable as it is inevitable.” – Bryne McLaughlin Writer
Norberg Hall continues to practice health + safety. Please note, although we will NOT host an opening reception for this exhibition, we do welcome you to the space. We invite you to visit the gallery in person [masks mandatory, vaccinations preferred + personal space respected] and/or to peruse the OVR [online viewing room] at your own leisure.