Review by Kristen Scholfield-Sweet
Ear to Ocean by Ebony Rose, is currently on exhibit at the Old Schoolhouse Gallery. This show
is an opportunity to ‘change it up.’ Ebony Rose is inviting us challenge our notions about how
art and space relate.
Art is conversation
The medium is the art work’s first identity. What happens to our sense of a work when a
painting, the process that created it, and the place in which we see it—are inseparable? When
place becomes material? We filter the ambient information that surrounds us. We do not create
this information, this information is the source that helps create us. Ebony Rose shares these
layers of conversation:with place as source, with process as content.
“I draw a line on a surface—something definitive, something even assured and then I pour in
water. I add diluted pigment. The water moves across the surface; it responds to the line.
Then the water with the air and light and/or me tilting the canvas, captivated by gravity and its
measures, influences flows and directions. For a moment there is tension and release. It is a
conversation with water.”
Installation is composition
The spatial relationship between all the parts of an image is its composition. Composition
determines the look of a work, the feelings we have, the meanings we receive. Ebony Rose
requires us to pause our expectations of “art in a gallery,“ and see her work within this particular
place, feel space as medium, find meaning in the art environment as well as in the art.
Ebony tells how she weaves place and feeling when she says:
“I set up somewhere to work—somewhere to assimilate the vista and let it move through
me—through materials investigations. I haul materials into the studio. And into the studio also
goes the air—the damp and fecund or the air hazy from the forest fires.”
Image is abstraction
The material world is impressed upon us from the first moment of life through each waking
moment of the day. The language of art is a language of sight: light, colour, pattern, line,
texture, harmony, rhythm. This language frames images, including abstractions. We recognize
these patterns. Our seeing something is what activates the meaning of the object seen. This
reciprocal action is at the heart of this exhibition. The images, their relation to each other and to
the space in which they are shown—makes conscious our unconscious feelings about what is
art, and about how we see it.
Ebony captures this subtle sense of reciprocal patterns when she says, “In the end there is a
painting—something very simple—an edge like the horizon and then the water moving around
this edge.”
A second look
Have a second look at Ear to Ocean before attending Ebony’s artist talk on Friday, July 26 at 7
pm at the Gallery. The show continues this Friday, 6-9, Saturday and Sunday, 2-6.