University of Winnipeg and downtown community newspaper
University of Winnipeg and downtown community newspaper
March 1 - April 30, 2018
Gallery 1C03 presents a deconstructed bookwork by local interdisciplinary artist Sylvia Matas in its public foyer, located beside the UWSA Info Booth at the University of Winnipeg. A huge space, largely empty is a non-linear narrative of photographs, drawings, and writing that revolves around an unnamed lake. On the first page, a character picks up a stone on a night walk in the country and throws it into a lake. At the end of the book someone approaches a lake where a hole has mysteriously formed in the ice. In between those two pages there are references to sleep, dreams, insomnia, memory, and spatial disorientation.
Lakes (which can be a symbol for the unconscious mind) appear throughout the book in the written narrative and also as drawings of bathymetric maps (maps which describe lake depth). Each of the three maps appear twice in the book – once in its original orientation and once as a mirror image.
The art of Sylvia Matas focuses on the grey area between reality and perception through an exploration of how we experience our surroundings and the passage of time. Her narratives are fragmented, withholding clear distinctions of beginning and ending, and suggest moments lifted from a larger story. This feeling of incompleteness makes space for completion of the narrative in the mind of the viewer. Through recurrent motifs of landscape, memory, dreams, disorientation, and time, her work explores the act of looking at images and how the viewer constructs meaning.
Free admission and wheelchair accessible location.
Open during University operating hours: 7 days per week, 7:00 am - 11:00 pm.