Lateral Symmetry

Events

Lateral Symmetry brings together four Manitoba women artists whose practices respond to Kowalsky’s work, focusing on the blurred boundaries between nature (whether wild or cultivated) and its human inhabitants. At the core of these artists’ practices is a focus on processes that foreground the inevitability of decay and the porous boundaries between natural and human domains. In some works, such as Tracy Peters’ Shed project and Elvira Finnigan’s Saltwatch experiments, objects and sites have undergone guided transformation that has been temporarily stalled for the exhibition. The artists’ attempts at controlling these natural and chemical processes are always met with their essentially unpredictable nature, such as in Basma Kavanagh’s colony of miniature pots that both suggest and are built to host living things. Meanwhile, Sarah Ciurysek’s towering photograph of layered earth situates the viewer underground, bringing to the fore the simultaneously disorienting and grounding depth of the soil beneath us.