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RE: Claim

A work in progress. This print was presented at the Sensing Alberta show at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in September, 2014. It relocates the contours of the tailings lakes of the Athabasca oil sands into a context that invites parodelia - - Seeing animate forms where none exist The next part of the project is the fabrication of ceramic vessels in these shapes coupled to transducers and filled with non-newtonian liquids to visualize a sound component.

Constellations

Images of a reshaped landscape are mediated through satellite imagery.Vertiginous zooming with mouse-wheel in google earth provides easy access to aerial depictions of adjacent lands. In looking through this orbiting lens we see the countryside from the distance at which we more commonly observe the clouds. This perspective collapses the corrugations of terrain into two dimensional forms.  This flattening is susceptible to pareidolia, the imposition of animate forms on contours that arise from unrelated processes.

  

Just as stars may seem to exist on a single plane across which we may draw constellations, so the shapes of these toxic ponds seem at such distances to become suggestive drawings. Given this uncanny asymmetry of mediated earthly distances and 'naked-eye' interstellar ones, we decided to reverse the background in this work and place the contours of the tailings ponds against the night sky, imagining them as inchoate characters of some unarticulated myth.