Roberta Bondar and Carole Sabiston: Dreams & Realities—Human Sensitivity of Place
Buhler Gallery, St. Boniface Hospital
409 Tache Avenue, Winnipeg
Opening Thursday, October 2, 2014
The Buhler Gallery is happy to present the work of these two living internationally acclaimed artists who, though working in different visual media, both voice concern for the protection of the natural environment, understanding its vulnerabilities while celebrating the beauty and magnificence of place. They each are fascinated by flight. One, a pioneer female astronaut has experienced space. The other expresses her concerns about the growing amounts of space debris in her imaginative depictions of flying carpets. They both explore the micro and macro of Canada, one through photography, the other through textile assemblage.
Roberta Bondar, OC, (b. 1945) originally from Sault Ste Marie, is a photographer, and neuro-physician as well as an astronaut. She prints her work at the celebrated Toronto studio of Ed Burtynsky. Bondar has created a significant body of work exploring the detail, diversity and magnitude of Canada’s national parks, capturing the richness of the flora, fauna, light and geology in each region. Ably conveying the individual personae of specific places, she portrays the widely known and those little known. Colour, texture and space become her focus. Her work has been published in Passionate Vision: Discovering Canada’s National Parks, the foreword written by Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The pieces for this exhibition will be drawn from that body of work and will also include recent images borrowed from the Art Gallery of Algoma. Bondar’s work was recently featured in a solo exhibition, Within the Landscape – Art Respecting Life at Calgary’s TELUS Spark Science Centre.
Carole Sabiston, OBC, RCA, (b. 1939) from Victoria, works in textile assemblage. She has done many major corporate and public commissions and has exhibited across Canada and in Europe. She has also been part of a number of international collaborations creating work with students from around the world, one project having been part of the Queen’s Jubilee and presented at Westminster Hall, London. Sabiston builds her art with layer upon layer of translucent and opaque materials, some reflective, some new and some ancient. Flight, light, colour and space are her primary subjects. She focuses on the fragile and fleeting elements of nature around us, drawing our attention through her imaginative wit and references to literature and its tales of flying carpets. Wind, water, fire and earth converge in her oeuvre as she conjectures about the increasing amounts of debris in space and the many natural vulnerabilities around us. Her work was the focus of a 2014 retrospective exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and has been published in Carole Sabiston: Everything Below All of the Above. The works for the Buhler Gallery exhibition will be borrowed from public and private collections as well as from the artist herself.
