New art installations spark off Fieldwork's 8th year

May 14, 2015

There is no better sign of the arrival of fair weather than the opening of Fieldwork, Maberly's outdoor art & sculpture gallery, with its new installations for the 2015 season.

On May 9 over 100 guests attended the opening for the four (soon to be five) new installations. The artists each spoke about their works, which cover a wide range of topics.

Master print maker Franc Van Oort's “Eye Box” shows what a truly renaissance man he is. Van Oort built a huge camera obscura, a centuries-old optical device that led to photography and the photographic camera. It is also used by artists to observe the rules of perspective in drawing and painting. The huge box can easily house 10 people, though a maximum or four are invited in at any one time. Once inside guests can view an amazing upside-down real image of the landscape outside as it appears on the back wall through a small lens opening located on the front wall. Viewers are encouraged to turn a wheel that moves the box, allowing the viewers to observe in increments a 360 degree view of the landscape outside.

Christine Nobel and Brain Barth had the theme of water in mind when they created their work titled “191 Meters”, named for the distance that the field sits above sea level. This Ottawa-based duo imagined the site as it would have been 12,000 years ago when it was covered by a glacial lake. Using thousands of coloured stakes impaled in the ground, the work aims to show the way the last remnants of the lake might have drained from the field. The stakes are arranged like a river alternating in seven different shades of green and blue and appear like a kind of wave invading this now land-locked landscape.

Kimberly Edgar, a Dawson City, Yukon-based artist whose work focuses on lino cuts, placed a number of her wheat-based bird cut outs throughout the deciduous forest on the site. The work titled “Bird Memories” recalls her younger days of bird watching with her grandmother in Ontario. Her birds are lively, colourful and playful and she has stuck them on a number of trees and rocks in and around the deciduous forest, making for a fun and impromptu game of hide and seek.

Annette Hegel's work titled “Two Guiding Principles” invokes her more politically minded concerns as an artist. This dwarf-sized town, which appears both unnaturally unrooted to its landscape and devoid of life, is comprised of roughly 50 identical cookie cutter houses, each painted a bland blue with grey roofs and set amidst barren sandy roads and muddy patches of ground. It speak of dryness, desolation with no colour and no signs of human life. The two principles Hegel is addressing in this work are the James Bay Hydro-electric project and the Quebec government “supposedly respecting Indigenous ways of life”.

Missing from the show was a fifth work by Gayle Young and Reinhard Reitzenstein titled “Castorimba Suspended”, which will be installed at a later date and is sure to add another interesting dimension to the site.

Also in attendance at the show were students from The Brooke Valley School with their work titled “Ornithology 101”. The group project involved the 13 students painting a number of birdhouses scattered throughout the area. Each student chose a different cavity-dwelling bird to represent and created displays about their bird of choice.

If you have yet to visit, Fieldwork it is well worth the trip and guests can enjoy numerous past installations still standing on site. For more information visit fieldworkproject.com. Fieldwork is generously supported by the Ontario Arts council and is free of charge.