Laura Peturson: Wasteland/Wanderland

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Laura Peturson, "Hogweed Forest," 2017

printed mural

Opening Reception: September 14, 2018, 7:00PM - 9:00PM

Wasteland/Wanderland is an immersive print-based installation that depicts children as the explorers of a beautiful, yet dystopian setting. Navigating a tangled landscape filled with genetically modified and invasive species, the figures are presented as both tenacious and vulnerable: the inheritors of an environment irrevocably altered by agribusiness and the proliferation of invasive plant species resulting from globalization. The landscape is cast in an active role, with aggressive and unpredictable power, instead of as a backdrop to our daily lives. The archetype of ‘The Woods’ as a simultaneously beautiful and perilous place is prevalent in children’s stories, and despite the accuracy of the scale relationships, the giant hogweed makes the children appear as diminutive as Alice in the Wonderland garden. The floor to ceiling mural encompasses three walls, and is comprised of woodcut, linocut, and papercut prints, layered over silhouetted imagery painted directly onto the walls.

Artist Bio:

Laura Peturson is a printmaker based in Northern Ontario. Her work uses narrative to explore themes of childhood, gender, and place. She is interested in the ways the domestic spaces we inhabit as children form our identity and a conception of our place in relation to family, geography, and nature. Peturson’s recent work has been exhibited at Flowers Gallery (New York, NY), The Thunder Bay Art Gallery (Thunder Bay, ON), White Water Gallery (North Bay, ON), and Idea Exchange (Cambridge, ON). In January 2017, she installed a 9 x 16 ft printmaking mural at the Gladstone Hotel as part of Come Up to My Room, an exhibit in the Toronto Design Offsite Festival. Her recent curatorial projects include a national artist residency for the creation of site-specific installations in North Bay entitled You are Here: Visualizing Place at the Gateway to the North. Peturson teaches printmaking, painting, and drawing at Nipissing University.