Birch

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Jane Everett, “Birch,” 2019

wood, wire and charcoal on drafting film/mixed media, 96" x 48" x 24" (photo by Yuri Akuney)

In British Columbia, trees are a sort of backdrop, a vague multitude, picturesque, absorbed peripherally, expected, the way children may think of parents as an always. We may assume the inevitability of their harvest (a gentle way to say logging) just as we may mindlessly assume their ever-presence. 

In her show, Birch, at Edmonton’s Bugera Matheson Gallery from Sept. 14 to Sept. 28, Okanagan-based artist Jane Everett offers a different experience of trees: intimate, poetic, arresting. She makes us tree-mindful.

Everett’s focus throughout her 30-plus-year career has been on expressing the profound feeling of nature-based beauty in visual form. She works in series, which usually begin with a wander through morning-lit forests near her summer place in the Shuswap, gathering impressions to develop later in the studio. 

Birch, the most distilled of her forest series, which also include Understory, Slipstream and Canopy, is a meditation on form and light, presence and impermanence, and shifting moments and perspectives, conveyed through the picturing of trees. And what trees! 

Her large, sweeping works in conté crayon and charcoal on drafting film reward like visual haikus: she gives just enough, leaving us spaces to fill from our own repositories. Newly, in Birch, Everett liberates the trees from two-dimensionality (and the gallery walls), slashing her figures into ceiling-to-floor strips that she suspends from above, offset, creating both a multi-planed view and movement, implied and actual.  

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Jane Everett, “Birch,” 2019

wood, wire and charcoal on drafting film/mixed media, 96" x 48" x 24" (photo by Yuri Akuney)

“The result is a shimmering effect, which I hope is closer to how the light comes through the forest,” says Everett. “Where I grew up [in Winnipeg] the bush is too dense to see through the forest, and I love the way the light filters through in our woods in the Shuswap.” 

Slicing one’s pristine work is brave. Lee Krasner did it, but only in anger, gathering the remnants of emotional outburst into gorgeous collage. Everett cuts her perfect drawings deliberately, with extreme care. She finds it freeing: “It feels wonderfully reckless.”

It also forces additional meaning. Everett reconnects us with the exquisite beauty of tree-ness we daily normalize, ignore and abandon, but she serves it to us severed. Can this deconstruction also be a euphemistic logging? It may be vertical, but slicing is still dismembering. 

“Dismembering?” She laughs when I ask. “Yes, indeed, and not least by muddling the line between drawing and sculpture.”  

Pulled closer to the magic in her marks, shadows and those whispery forms gently savaged – made strange and new – we are invited see anew the forest and the trees. ■

Birch is on view at the Bugera Matheson Gallery in Edmonton from Sept. 14 to Sept. 28, 2019. 

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