Edie Marshall: "Terrain", Art Gallery of Regina, to Feb. 27, 2016

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Edie Marshall, "Terrain", 2013-2015, oil on paper, detail

Edie Marshall, "Terrain", 2013-2015, oil on paper, detail

Edie Marshall has had a long fascination with the history and varied ecologies of the Great Plains. As a painter, she has explored this familiar terrain in several serial bodies of work. 

    Last winter, she and her husband, Greg, set out on a road trip that took them from Regina as far as the deserts of Arizona and back. As they headed south, Marshall began to do what most what most contemporary travellers do – she took pictures with her iPhone, both from their moving car and during their periodic hiking breaks, posting them on social media to share with friends and family.

Returning home with some 1,500 photographs, she began to reflect on her compulsion to record such a vast corpus.

As a painter, Marshall unpacks visual images that interest her with a far more archaic technology, transmitting from eye to hand, stroke by stroke, the subtleties of colour and composition. It’s her way of reflecting on what she sees, slowing the brain’s tendency to quickly identify and sort visual data. 

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Edie Marshall, "Terrain", 2013-2015, oil on paper, detail

Edie Marshall, "Terrain", 2013-2015, oil on paper, detail

After editing her photos down to 1,000 images, she began to copy, or to use her word, translate, them onto small square-format sheets of primed paper using thick oil paint and broad brushes.  

She mounted each image on larger panels in the now-familiar format in which grids of photos appear on cellphones. Each painting in this panorama is presented in the sequence in which the original photo was taken, so viewers of her installation at the Art Gallery of Regina can see at a glance the cumulative changes in the landscape’s colour and composition and the seasonal contexts through which she travelled.

Marshall’s work reflects on our contemporary image-recording compulsions in juxtaposition to the ephemerality of the very images we feel compelled to document. 

By routing her travel pictures back through the traditional format of small oil panels in the plein air landscape tradition, she short-circuits this visual overload, both for herself and her viewers.

“I not only see this project as being about the seemingly infinite realm of the visual world,” she says, “but also about the excesses in our material world.”