Exhibitions 2000-2001
March 15 - April 14, 2001
The Infinite Between
Neal Hall (Toronto), Ellen Moffat (Saskatoon) Steve Topping (no fixed address), Marion Manning (Guelph, Ontario)
The Infinite Between serves as a meeting point for a group of artists focusing on the Canadian landscape within a time-space continuum. Moffat's photographic series Line Break, shot from a train window, every hour on the hour of her cross-country journey, marks both time and place, substituting a found reality for the mythic Canadian landscape one expects to see.
Topping's film Reading Canada Backwards deconstructs filmic flow, as well as the illusion of national continuity; shooting an average three frames per mile, Topping presents a jagged succession of views as we bump along from Vancouver to Halifax, points on the map connected only by a long succession of rails. Neal Hall shoots his untitled sequences from moving cars and trains, mapping out conceptual links between tangential routes, sometimes connected by circumstance, sometimes only through his imagination. Marion Manning's millennium project Tracking Dawn, begun on the summer solstice 1999, follows the sun as it rises each morning for a year. Recording the trajectory of the sunrise day after day as it shifts over a non-descript Canadian strip mall, Manning catches different people moving through their daily routines. Remaining in the same place throughout the course of the year, she manages to capture not only the changing seasons but the changing quality, angle, colour, and intensity of light as the year unfolds. Each of these artists uses the idea of a cross-country journey, whether it be made by a train, a car, or the sun, as a literal and metaphorical vehicle for exploring issues of place, national identity, landscape, and time - space-time.