MARTEN BERKMAN, "Remote Sensibility," March 26 to May 24, 2009, Yukon Arts Centre, Whitehorse

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"Pillar of Light"

Marten Berkman, "Pillar of Light," 2007, stereoscopic photograph.

MARTEN BERKMAN, Remote Sensibility

Yukon Arts Centre, Whitehorse

March 26 to May 24, 2009

By Jill Sawyer

Anyone with even a basic experience of art has viewed a landscape, as a painting, a photograph, or other two-dimensional medium. In his exhibition Remote Sensibility, Whitehorse-based artist Marten Berkman wants to bring viewers right into the picture. Using an advanced form of large-scale three-dimensional technology — high-definition stereoscopic video — Berkman will give viewers a sense of being immersed in some of the Canadian North’s most remote places. “We’re familiar with 3D technology being used in old movies, to create spectacle,” Berkman says. “I’m interested in using the technique to bring people to a place of stillness, where they can sit by a stream, watch the leaves sway, and just be present.” The Remote Sensibility project, made up of multiple components that the artist has been working on for three years, is mainly concerned with the place at which human culture and industry meet the natural world. A skilled landscape and commercial photographer and videographer, he has taken filtered video cameras far north, to the shore of the Beaufort Sea, to Baffin Island, bringing the human experience into places of pure, vast nature. “This is about exploring our relationship with the land and figuring out where we fit into the natural world.”