Pulling focus Through, and through a green, green lens

If there’s a seed from which Sarah Ciurysek’s artistic practice sprouted, it’s buried deep in the dirt, under a willowy canopy, on her family’s grain farm near Peace River, Alta.

That would explain why the photographer’s lens is typically trained at the roots instead of angled toward the treetops.

By nature and through nurture, Ciurysek’s practice is terrestrially bound.

“I have more of a familiarity or comfort with being outside, just lying down on the ground. I always had a desire to put my hands in the dirt or just lie down in the grass,” says Ciurysek, an associate professor in the School of Art at the University of Manitoba.

Compelled to touch grass — to silence urban and technological distraction to reconnect with the natural world — Ciurysek often heads to the forest, an environment that served as an inspiration for her solo exhibit Through, and through, on view at the Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts (100 Arthur St.) until Nov. 15.

At Platform on Friday at 6 p.m., Ciurysek will be joined in conversation by hannah_g, a local writer and the curator of the Galerie Buhler Gallery, to discuss the exhibition as part of Platform’s active research lecture series. The event is free to the public.

In taking photographs of gnarled branches, mossy bases and rich soils, Ciurysek was always moved toward consideration of her own impact on the land, but in recent years, she grew enthralled by the dappled light that slipped through the gaps between the semi-transparent leaves.

“I learned that the trees are acting as pinhole cameras, with the leaves basically an aperture, just like a camera lens. For me, it’s always been about the light going through,” says Ciurysek.

Curated by Platform’s Meganelizabeth Diamond, Through, and through finds Ciurysek climbing up the tree trunk to explore that dancing passage of light through large-format photography, collage and a new-to-her medium: stained glass.

“I’m rather new to glass, and so I was in this zone where I didn’t really strongly have the rules in me yet,” she says, gesturing toward Green for Awakening, a 2.4-by-1.8-metre modular piece.

That novelty led Ciurysek to explore the pinhole effect. While Green for Awakening is the exhibition’s welcoming image — a forest wall made of modern glass — To a Green Thought in a Green Shade fits on a small ledge, where an IKEA clamp light shines through a century-old plate negative the artist bought on eBay.

“There’s so much mystery around it. There’s so much history in that negative,” says Ciurysek.

That unknown element is counterbalanced by Ciurysek’s awareness that every other piece in the exhibit can easily be traced — in her own mind — to its place of origin, whether at the base of a toppled tree in Birds Hill Provincial Park or to the willow-olive hybrid tree she planted at her family’s farm in Alberta as an act of mourning and remembrance a decade ago.

Where will the trees leave you standing?

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com