From Laura Millard’s series Glide

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Glide by Laura Millard
Skew Gallery
Thursday, November 22 - Sunday, December 16

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Skew Gallery

As winter forces us to slow down, Skew Gallery glides with its latest exhibition, featuring work from Ontario artist and professor Laura Millard. The inspiration behind Millard’s series Glide is derived from Calgary’s own backyard, Banff National Park.

The Ontario-based artist and Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) professor works with both painting and photography in an amalgamated effort to capture and display fragments of frozen landscapes that are so abundant in rural Canada. Millard investigates the surface of frozen bodies of water of near northwestern proximity. Air bubbles trapped beneath the surface of a freezing lake and the ephemeral marks from the blades of ice skaters document past action and movement, just as Millard documents these landscapes with photography.

Photography is the definition of detail — a source of visual accuracy instantly recording meticulous details that most painters would have neither the patience nor skill to capture. The properties that restrict photography and film as mechanisms of flawless reproduction serve it as an artistic medium. It encourages painters to separate themselves from the information seen by the eye and to perform their own adaptations to make it a truly expressive testimony.

Millard treats her aluminum-mounted chromera colour prints with oil paint. She carefully manipulates these initially gestural lines by meticulously tracing them with an almost pointillist approach. Mostly white oil paint is dabbed atop the vertical, horizontal, diagonal and circular marks on and within the frozen rinks, as she plays with the painterly qualities of abstraction.

The composition of these photographs is cropped in such a way that it is not immediately apparent that you are looking at landscape. Initially, Millard’s Glide series recalls lines familiar to gestural abstraction. It is this quality that attracted her to use these images. “The gestural traces within the ice and the drawing-like skate marks on its surface led me to explore working on the surfaces of the photographs,” Millard says. “The crisscrossed and circling skate marks interwoven on the reflective plane of ice creates a ‘drawing’ through the incised lines left by the torque and glide of the skater’s movement.”

An interesting feature about the lines left behind is that the skill level is apparent in the types of marks created and determines the esthetic qualities of the piece, making it almost interactive. Away features choppy, jagged remnants of skaters slowly and self-consciously pushing and pulling across the surface of the ice. Skate and Heart Mountain, on the other hand, display smooth, flawless and perfectly symmetrical lines that could have been drawn by a geometric compass.

The exclusion of sky in Millard’s landscape pieces is disorienting, and perhaps done to escape categorization. Millard’s interest in the “vertiginous shifts between micro and macro views and the painterly qualities of motion held within the ice” is what initially drew her to photograph the subject. She shifts out of landscape view in Ice Diamond. This piece is a close-up of a cascading mass of air bubbles trapped behind a clear layer of frozen ice. The bubbles look like cluttered stars and galaxies frozen in a vacuum of space. Ice Flower, which gives detailed focus to white frosted flowers, stands visually out of place, yet conceptually retains the view of ice and movement.

Methods of film and photography steal glimpses of time, holding on to moments passed and vestige lost. Since the birth of reproduction, artists have attempted this medium on its own, as well in conjunction with other processes. Millard strategically implements photography as a vehicle of documenting delineated movements and trappings, inadvertently created in an interactive way. The skaters are not aware of their involvement in the work; neither are the remnants below the surface of ice. Through her further manipulation of the prints, she turns these spontaneous gestures into conscious deliberations, successfully altering them from what critic Heinz Ohff calls “a purely informative document” to an “artistic testimony.”