Stroll into the main gallery at the Vernon Public Art Gallery and you may hear the beckoning call of a loon or the distant roll of thunder. These sounds, among others, from the natural world complement the large photographic prints, video, sculptural installations and poetic wall and floor text in the recently opened exhibition, Rewilding: The Forest Will Forget Us, by artists John Freeman, Bernd Hildebrandt, Liz Ingram and Lyndal Osborne, that runs until Dec. 20.
These four Canadian artists, with an international exhibition record, are also two couples and friends who share a passion for the natural environment, and in particular, a section of land with a lake in the Alberta boreal forest that was once a homesteader’s haven.
A forest alive with new growth in and among the decay and remains of earlier human habitation: decomposing log cabin, wooden sleigh runners, iron artifacts and more detritus are the inspiration and informs the artists’ artworks.
One of the central ideas their art asks us to consider is our bodily - our human - relationship with nature that so readily swallows us up when we depart, one way or another.
The exhibition title derives from a poem by Hildebrandt which is stencilled on the wall to be read when you enter the space: “The forest will forget us amongst its drooping limbs and slow dark waters. It will hide our bodies from ourselves under living and fallen spruce whose shadows, spreading like fingers, camouflage our paths and cool our fires…”
Other passages from Hildebrandt’s creative writing can be read stencilled on the floor at the entrance to and on a sleeping mat inside the custom-made silk tent. The tent’s surface imagery are photographic screened prints of singular bodies and coupled bodies wrapped in each others’ arms laying in a thick carpet of verdant moss in a canopy of dense forest where streaks of evening sunlight find them.
There is a selection of large format photographs exhibited by Ingram and Hildebrandt, some revealing parts of the human body smeared with peat and in other photographs the body is posed among the rusted remains of manufactured steel objects (a chain as one example).
Osborne effectively employs repetition in her installation artwork and one of her artworks, Grove – 54 vertically soft-sculptured de-limbed spruce tree poles hanging from the ceiling – makes you feel like walking through this re-created thick forest; or even want to touch these forms, like one visitor wanted to do and asked the artist if it was permitted at the exhibition opening.
Take a walk with Freeman as he guides you through this forest on the land these four artists love, in one of Freeman’s four-part looping video installations. The artist also shifts perspective using a drone to capture a bird’s eye view of the surface of the lake and the land in another part of his installation.
These artists pose universal questions through the specificity of place. Asking how can we shift our perspective? How can we be more in touch, more intimate and aware of ourselves with each other and our vital relationship with the natural environment on our walk through it during our lifetime? As Ingram concluded at completion of the artist’s talks at the exhibition opening – maybe love is in the answer.
