![]() Two of the most powerful works in the show are large digital prints mimicking, with immense success, the still-life paintings of the Dutch Golden Age. Healthier than bees exposed to neonicotinoids. They’re pissed off, we imagine, but otherwise healthy and unharmed. In this image, bees crawl over the trespassing flatbed scanner, depositing bits of wax, honey, pollen, and propolis on the glass. On another part of the life-energy plane, there’s a digital scan of the interior of a beehive, created in the early 2000s by Winnipeg artist Aganetha Dyck (who has made a distinctive career of “collaborating” with bees in the creation of her art) and her son Richard Dyck. Not that we would say that Bobak’s landscape is “better” than FitzGerald’s rather, it is more obviously invested in the mid-20th-century myth of the potent, modernist male artist. ![]() In contrast, Bruno Bobak’s circa-1960 pastel drawing of a field of poppies bursts with saturated hues and mark-making energy. Titled Dead Trees, it is a study of twisted and truncated forms, an image that seems to have fallen off the other side of assertion. ![]() And there’s a pale and muted circa-1930 oil painting of a riverside park by L.L. ![]() There are 17th-century etchings of butterflies, moths, and beetles by Wenzel Hollar, mid-19th-century daguerreotypes of people posed in garden settings by Hermann Carl Eduard Biewend, and a (rather lonely) Victorian-era, floral-themed ceramic tile by William De Morgan. Flora and Fauna also suggests what landscapes, still lifes, and botanical illustrations have to say about European exploration and colonization and the Age of Enlightenment’s impulse to classify and control the natural world. Focused on the front yards and façades of little, postwar houses, these images reveal scads about late-20th-century values-and function, too, as portraits of the homeowners. Outstanding among the garden works are Jim Breukelman’s colour photos from his “Hot Properties” series. The show is a kind of mini survey of the recurrence of nature-based themes in art, such as gardens, with all their attendant symbolism and their revelations about the human impulse to tame, order, and enclose troublesome nature. Organized by the National Gallery of Canada, mostly from its own collections, the 74 works on view at the Surrey Art Gallery range from a 16th-century Indian miniature painting by an unknown artist to a big, astounding 21st-century digital photomontage by Ottawa-based Lorraine Gilbert (known indeed). But never mind: Flora and Fauna is an engrossing show, replete with visual delights. What this show really reveals is the shifting ways in which culture constructs an idea of nature.Īnother surprise is that the flora definitely predominates while the fauna is sparse and mostly of the insectival variety-disappointing if you were hoping for images of cute and furry or large and noble woodland creatures. Inspiration: that’s an oddly romantic notion. According to the show’s media release and introductory panel, it examines how “painters, printmakers, photographers, and craftspeople have been inspired by nature over the centuries”. At the Surrey Art Gallery until December 14įlora and Fauna is filled with surprises-including its reluctance to advertise what it’s really about.
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