The exhibition Stilled Waters will be on view at the Hidden Garden Gallery in New Denver, BC from August 1-6, 2023. An evening event will celebrate both the opening and closing of this exhibition, from 7-9pm on Thursday, August 3 with music by The Charms.

I’ll be at the gallery every day that week, from 10am to 3pm. Come say hello! 112 Slocan Ave, New Denver, BC.

This exhibition is about a project from 2019 in which I built a kayak and paddled it the length of the Columbia River. This river is more like a series of reservoirs, chopped up and bloated by 14 dams. Where the waters once flowed, they now have been stilled.

I undertook the 2019 project for a number of reasons, but one of the major ones was to test a hypothesis … that it is possible to find a sense of true connection to the natural world even in deeply altered landscapes, even with all the noisy distractions of a world that lives and breathes capitalism.

That question, asked a thousand times over, would prompt me to refocus on the tiniest detail in front of me. Most often, that detail was in the surface of the water. In this way, the 100+ days I spent on the Columbia became a meditation on water surfaces.

The exhibition will include a large scale installation of fabric that has been printed with photographs of water surfaces of the Columbia River, as well as the skin-on-frame kayak.