Liz Ingram and Bernd Hildebrandt

A love story to the earth ­­– and each other.

by

Inside Edmonton’s SNAP Gallery hangs a sensory shrine of an art show, full of evidence of ritualistic healing, including pleasant footage of a creek into which its two artists have repeatedly stripped and slipped. 

Although mostly visual, it’s an exhibition you’ll hear as well as see, and – in one instance that giddily bucks off two years of pandemic distancing and isolation – you’re beckoned to touch, as well.

The show – prints on paper, two hanging printed-fabric installations, a pair of fallen logs and an artist bookwork spread out on the wall – comes together as Touching Gravitas, very much about the fragility and interconnectedness of humans and nature.

Gathered and processed by senior-level Edmonton artists Liz Ingram and Bernd Hildebrandt over the last few years, it runs until March 19 in the gallery, which recently relocated to north of downtown. 

Given the chaos and impatient honking lately, it’s just what the doctor ordered. Quite literally so, given the medical imagery – MRI scans embedded in the art – sourced from Ingram’s ongoing seven-year fight with cancer, which she’s happily surviving.

Active through every stage of SNAP’s 40-year history as a print shop and artist-run centre, Ingram, who was born in Buenos Aires, taught printmaking at the University of Alberta for more than 35 years before retiring five years ago. 

Working inseparably with the poetic text and photographed body of her partner, Bernd Hildebrant, the entire time (they take turns as photographer and model), Ingram has exhibited more than 300 times across the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the Americas. 

Yet, oddly, this is her first solo exhibit at SNAP, onto which she immediately threw her forever-partner Hildebrandt’s name — just as he’s put so many of his words into her work over the years.

The result is a densely-packed, multimedia love letter to each other, the gallery, and their piece of boreal forest just outside Edmonton, which stands in symbolically for all nature. 

Touching Gravitas is rife with evidence of rolling around naked in the water and mud, collecting photographic details – a navel here, an elbow crook there. Is that a heel or a rock? The fact we can’t instantly tell is the message: it’s all part of the same system.

Throughout groups of straight enlargements and more abstract prints in Ingram’s familiar collage and mark-making motifs, there’s a sense of inevitable aging, mortality and renewal – life and death moving in a slow and single swirl, from a tiny worm on a photographed finger to river rocks still around after millions of years.

Entering the gallery, the first thing you notice are Hildebrandt’s giant hands, printed on fabric, carefully holding an image of Ingram’s brain. This nurturing gesture, Light Touch (version 2), hangs from the ceiling in a sort of triangulated doorway. Best spot for a selfie, by the way.

Abstract prints hang framed around the installation, which ripples and dances a little as you disturb the air by walking past.

Up on the wall, is the pair’s limited-edition bookwork — a series of diptychs and triptychs titled Touching Gravity — beautiful, waterless lithography relief prints on fragile Honen kozo paper, which shows further abstracts with text and belly buttons and downstairs hair.

In the show’s second room, digitally unaltered photographs hang in orderly groups: body parts and moss, water and leaves, and even a single fly on flesh that are collectively titled Body Interface. Fallen logs lie beneath, asking to be felt, even smelled.

A series of scraped-blank images in one corner, meanwhile, is a gut reaction to Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires, a monument to people killed by the state over decades, including victims thrown from planes into the estuary of the Rio de la Plata. 

Doubling down on the rotten traits of our species, are two hanging tapestries of printed flames – the floor covered with vinyl-lettered verb phrases of things we human do, good and bad: to grow, to groan, to hate, to bare, to sigh, to touch, and so on. All of which, the installation clearly implies, will be wiped out if we aren’t more careful with the planet.

Which is not to say Touching Gravitas is preachy: all this sensory symbolism exists ethereally in the abstract. And indeed, no matter what we do, our entire planet will one day be swallowed up by the sun – so if you want the flames to stand for that moment, feel free.

But even then, the overall message remains: whatever moments we get to spend between the timelines of worms and mountains is something to be thankful for and to fight to maintain, even when we have to get our hands dirty to do the work. ■

Liz Ingram and Bernd Hildebrandt, Touching Gravitas, at SNAP Gallery in Edmonton, from Feb. 15 to March 19, 2022.

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SNAP Gallery

10572 115 Street, Edmonton, Alberta T5H 3K6

780-423-1492

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Tues, Wed noon - 6 pm; Thurs noon - 7 pm; Fri, Sat Noon - 5 pm; (Call ahead pending official opening in March.)