Liz Ingram and Bernd Hildebrandt: Touching Gravitas

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Liz Ingram and Bernd Hildebrandt, "Touching Gravitas," 2022

installation view showing "Light Touch (version 2), 2019-2022, digital inkjet on Silk Habotai with reactive dye, rope, steel hoops, wool gloves, Styrofoam balls and drapery weights (photo by Bernd Hildebrandt)

Liz Ingram and Bernd Hildebrandt: Touching Gravitas

This exhibition results from years of collaboration and intimate contact between Bernd Hildebrandt, Liz Ingram and a special site in the boreal forest of Alberta. Consisting of printed works on paper, fabric print installations, video works, objects, and an artist bookwork, this exhibition strives to give the viewer an experience that re-establishes understanding, sense of place and responsibility within nature. Images of body contact with trees, moss, rich muskeg peat, and water speak of ‘otherly’ connections and love within nature.  Other works allude to precariousness – to climate changes that are causing fire, floods and other devastating occurrences. A fragile and rather melancholic artist bookwork evokes a sense of touch, memory and the passing of time, utilizing images and text gathered during a prolonged stay in Buenos Aires, the city of Ingram’s birth.

Artist Statement:

This exhibition pays tribute to the forty-year anniversary of the Society of Northern Alberta Print-Artists. It also marks forty years of our marriage – a time of living, loving, raising two sons, playing, and working together. Our collaborative art production is focused on transitional states between material presence and the ephemeral, investigating what it means to be human within nature. Our prime inspiration for image and word source material has been and continues to be a particular place/lake/stream in the boreal forest of Alberta. We have recorded and presented our personal interactions within its ‘nature’, through evocative photographic and printed images, poetic text, tactile materials and various interpretive media. These have been intimate and personal as in the prints and artist bookworks, and spatial and sensual as in our tent/image/text installations.

Our most recent collaborative works utilized site-specific installations of images and words which attempt to re-awaken an awareness of our inextricable and fundamental oneness with nature, and our need to connect through our senses. This process has become more poignant and essential than ever in today’s world of the transient, virtual, digitized realities contrasted with the rapid extinction of species and transformation of land, sea and atmosphere. Using printed images, paper, ink, light, and fabric, we are striving to give the viewer an experience that affirms their understanding, sense of place and responsibility within nature.

About the artists:

Liz Ingram was born in Argentina and grew up in New Delhi, Mumbai and Toronto. For over forty years she taught at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and is currently Distinguished University Professor Emerita. She works in various media including etching, lithography, digital print, and installation. Her artworks have been exhibited in numerous solo and duo exhibitions, and over 300 group exhibitions in North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and the Far East. She has received awards for her prints at juried exhibitions in Canada, Slovenia, Poland, Korea, Brazil, Estonia, India and Finland. Other awards include: Royal Canadian Academy of Arts membership, 1998; the J. Gordin Kaplan Award for Research Excellence at the University of Alberta, 2008; the City of Edmonton Hall of Fame, 2008; the University Cup, 2011; the Royal Society of Canada membership, 2011; the Order of Canada membership, 2017; and the University Distinguished Alumni Award, 2021. Recent solo/duo exhibitions include: Touching Gravity, ‘ace AIR Gallery, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2018; Water/Bodies, FAB Gallery, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, 2017; Site Collaborations, Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax, NS, 2017; Liz Ingram: Print Encounters, Prince Takamado Gallery, Embassy of Canada, Tokyo, Japan, 2015. www.lizingram.com

With a background in industrial and graphic design, and sculpture Bernd Hildebrandt plans exhibit spaces, designs display furniture and installs exhibitions that integrate objects, images and words. Working as an independent exhibit designer he has designed a number of extensive object based exhibits including: Edgar Degas: the Figure in Motion, Art Gallery of Alberta, Discovering Dinosaurs, for University of Alberta Museums and various exhibits (2007 – 2017) showcasing Chinese robes and scroll paintings from The Mactaggart Art Collection, University of Alberta. An interest in writing poetry has sparked numerous collaborations with Liz Ingram in which his poems are integrated into the fabric of her often large-scale images and prints. Working together has been very productive and has resulted in: temporary installations (2011-2018) in Poland, Germany, Argentina, Edmonton; permanent installations at the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium (April 2011); and gallery exhibitions at the Glenbow Museum (2011), the Chelsea Art Museum in New York (2012), FAB Gallery, Edmonton (2017)and ‘ace AIR Gallery, Buenos Aires, Argentina, (2018). www.hilxing.com