Friday, April 27, 2018 to Thursday, June 7, 2018
OPENING RECEPTION Friday, April 27th, 7:00pm - 9:00pm Show is on view April 27th - June 7th, 2018 Forest City Gallery is pleased to present Echo Location, a solo exhibition by Laura Findlay. Echo Location explores the role of symbolism, painting, and installation as a conduit for allegory, lore, and communication through confrontations between naturalism and supernaturalism. The exhibition considers liminal spaces and creatures as a channel for fragmented communication. These augmentations suggest a transformation of Forest City Gallery into an inhabited liminal zone that uses movement, gesture, colour, and light to imbue a viewing experience that is mystical and enchanted. This transmutation from gallery to grotto welcomes a meditative reflection on symbol, gesture, and communication. Laura Findlay overlays process and symbol in the reproduction of images sourced from the internet, library books, newspapers and magazines. Their disconnected origins speak of fragmentary information interconnected through gestural reproduction and arrangement. She use additive and destructive gestures as a method of communicating the subjective dimensions of my imagery in an effort to engage viewers in the act of creation in response to a moment from history. Paint is scraped, wiped, thinned, smeared and pushed to produce imagery that utilize the reciprocity of material histories in the final surface. Laura Findlay's practice explores the relationship between empathy, veracity, destruction, and creation through confrontations between naturalism and supernaturalism. This involves gathering and filtering imagery and documents as reference to produce a subjective recount of historical moments through painting and installations. Findlay is interested in the extended empathetic response to a calamitous moment and the relationship this has in the reception of an artwork. Laura Findlay completed my MFA from the University of Guelph in 2014. Since then, she has had numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Canada, the United States, and Europe. Her most recent exhibition projects have appeared at Evans Contemporary (Peterborough, 2018), Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto, 2017), the Kamloops Art Gallery (2017), Projet Pangee (Montreal, 2017), and Lord Ludd (Philadelphia, 2016) among others. In 2016 Findlay participated in an independent intensive self-directed residency at The Banff Centre and was the 2017 recipient of the Brucebo Fine Art Scholarship, funding a four-month long residency and accompanying exhibition in Gotland, Sweden.