EXHIBIT
Somewhere Beyond Nowhere
Where: Deluge Contemporary Art (636 Yates St.)
When: Friday to Oct. 6
Opening reception Friday at 7 p.m.
Remember that cabin in the woods where your family summered during your childhood? Or that mountain trail you haven't hiked in years?
Chances are, their present-day appearance doesn't quite match up with the images you've preserved in your mind. Memories, after all, morph over time; places have a similar tendency.
Photographer Tara Nicholson explores this disconnect in her new exhibition Somewhere Beyond Nowhere, a collection of about 20 colour stills that highlight the effect human leisure practices have on the natural landscape.
"I'm interested in how people mark the land, how people use it in a very temporary way, for vacation or retreat," said Nicholson, an instructor at the University of Victoria and the Vancouver Island School of Art.
To flesh out the concept, the Port Moody-raised shutterbug explored bucolic locales in B.C., Alberta and even as far afield as Holland, snapping photos along the way.
"Many are sites I remember visiting," she said. "I grew up going to the Okanagan and had grandparents who took me hiking all over, so these are places I'm returning to."
Inevitably, Nicholson discovered the scenes had changed during her absence.
She recalled a quiet refuge in East Sooke she'd travelled to in her youth and revisited as an adult: "I always remember these crazy cabins from the '70s that were totally overgrown and not being used and random stuff like boats.
"Now, literally like 100 feet from that, there's a brand-new mansion that's being built."
She turned her lens to these sights, as well as others that bore remnants of human activity.
Derelict cars, an abandoned boat and a disassembled waterslide - all examples of long-neglected debris - feature in the shots she's chosen to exhibit. In contrast, other selections show signs of nascent development.
The collection, gathered over a two-year period, speaks to the complex, sometimes ironic nature of humans' relationship with the environment.
"Nowadays, places like the Galapagos, people are using them for pilgrimage - even going to Saltspring Island or Tofino - to have that connection," Nicholson said.
"I think my own photography exposes that tension: how we use nature as a retreat from modernity and how we also sort of destroy it."
