Fathoming Nature’s Mysteries

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Julya Hajnoczky, “Larix laricina,” 2019

archival pigment print, 1/25, 36” x 24” (courtesy of the artist)

Unaided human perception is limited in its ability to interpret the scale and complexity of the natural world. Many things are too small for our eyes to see, too quiet for our ears to hear, or too intertwined for our brains to fathom.

Julya Hajnoczky seeks to overcome these challenges with large-scale still life photographs in a two-person exhibition, Closer, on view at UBC’s Beaty Biodiversity Museum in Vancouver until Nov. 10. The show also features work by Katrina Vera Wong.

A key focus of Hajnoczky’s work is researching ecosystems. She visits various landscapes and documents them with analogue and digital photography.

But Hajnoczky, a graduate of the Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, also collects plant specimens and things like animal bones and bird feathers as she seeks to understand interconnections in biological systems.

For Closer, she captured images of her collected items not with a conventional camera but by placing them on a high-resolution flatbed scanner.

“The scanner is my camera,” she says, noting that it also works as a magnifying glass, allowing her to enlarge images. “I was able to experiment, seeing different sizes and choosing the one I liked best.

“In some cases, the items have all been collected from the same location," she says in her artist statement. "In other cases, they serve to illustrate connections in ecosystems that may not be immediately apparent to a casual observer.

"In still other pieces, the arrangements may highlight more aesthetic aspects of the specimens – similarities in shape or structure, for instance.”

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Julya Hajnoczky, “Haliaeetus leucocephalus,” 2019

archival pigment print, 1/25, 36” x 24” (courtesy of the artist)

A work titled Haliaeetus leucocephalus, the scientific name for bald eagles, depicts a feather, a twig with lichen and three delicate vertebrae. Presumably, she collected them from the same locale. It leads one to think about eagles within the larger context of a forest.

Larix laricina, a species of larch, has the spare yet exquisite quality of Japanese bonsai. Two small sprigs are suspended against the stark black background that Hajnoczky uses in all the images in the exhibition. The sprays of needles bring to mind fireworks against a night sky. A clump of dirt with mossy foliage anchors the image’s base.

Hajnoczky’s images evoke the antiquarian tradition of cabinets of curiosities, collections of oddities from around the world that became popular as Europe extended its colonial grasp. These cabinets or, sometimes rooms, were filled with botanical and zoological specimens, geological finds and human artifacts.

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Katrina Vera Wong, “F. aureus,” 2018

plant material, heavy gel and found object, 2” x 2” x 2” (courtesy of the artist).

Meanwhile, Wong experiments with flowers and ideas about hybridization, creating what she calls Frankenflora, using pressed and dried plants to construct artificial botanicals.

She was inspired by What If You Slept, a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge that refers to a “strange and beautiful flower” plucked from a dream in heaven.

Wong, grieving the death of her father, became fascinated by the mutability of orchids and began piecing together parts of dead flowers, in a sort of post-life hybridization that she sees as a balm for mourning.

“We are born into this world the product of two genetic codes, but along the way we pick up bits of the people we love and bits of the things we marvel at,” Wong says in her statement. “And in the end, we leave as a whole greater than the sum of these parts.” ■

Closer is on view at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum in Vancouver from May 18 to Nov. 10, 2019.