 |
|
Title: Locus -work no longer on site. |
Artist: Lyla Rye |
Exhibition year: 2002 |
|
Lyla Rye, the other artist featured in the exhibition, was still at work on her piece in the basement of the cabin when I arrived. She was cutting words out of a huge rubber matt ring that she would later carry to the edge of the meadow clearing and place around a Junniper bush. Like Dijkstra, Rye's first associations with the landscape she encountered at the Tree Museum were fanciful and mythic, with Jacob and Wilheim Grimm's fairy tale, The Junniper Tree, the initial impetus for her artwork. Unlike Dijkstra, however, who had transformed her intuitive reaction to the landscape into an abstract metaphor for an enchanted nature, Rye's process of metamorphosis was grounded in the retelling of local history. The words that Rye was cutting into the rubber ring that day were culled from her childhood memories of summers spent in the area and a local farmer's remininences of tent caterpillar infestations and DDT sprayings and the disappearance of the small green frogs and their regeneration after the banning of the pesticide. Once installed in-situ, the black rubber ring served as both amulet and archive: a testimonial inscription of an environmental geneology in which the viewer would have to walk round and round the Junniper bush in order to decipher the intertwined stories. In this tracing and retracing of the landscape as a source of memory, Rye had transformed the toxic waste of rubber tires into a scroll of words that renerated the earth they lay upon. Through her metamorphosis from fairy-tale to rememberance, she had created a concrete metaphor for the symbiotic conjoining of things and beings.
Dot Tuer, "Metamorphosis and Metaphor: The Re-Enchantment of Nature and Art " The Tree Museum, (The Tree Museum, 2002-2003) |
|
Lyla Rye is an installation artist who lives and works in Toronto. She received a BFA from York University and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has exhibited nationally & internationally since 1989. Recent solo exhibitions include Plato's Drive-In, Harbourfront, Toronto (2008), Interplay, Herrmann & Wagner, Berlin (2007), Hopscotch, Agnes Etherington Gallery, Kingston & Esplanade Gallery, Medicine Hat (2006 & 07); Flesh and Blood, Cambridge Public Galleries, Ontario (2003). Internationally, Rye has exhibited in San Francisco, New York, Adelaide, Australia, Paris, & Berlin. Her work is in the collections of York University, Robert McLaughlin Gallery and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.
|