David Pirrie, Mt Shuksan, 2005, oil on canvas.
David Pirrie: Western Drift
September 5 – November 18, 2006
Teck Gallery
David Pirrie's series of paintings and drawings at the Teck Gallery addresses the idea of the mountain in a systematic way by separating individual mountain units from their surrounding context. Pirrie's works are a form of cataloguing—a type of technical meditation on topography and mapping. Extracting the once-feared mountains from their physical context, Pirrie converts mountain units into objects for study, floating them in a monochrome sea, which is what these mountains were doing 100 million years ago.
Pirrie's own words best describe his involvement with mountains: “For the past three years I have taken specific mountain peaks and rendered them in a form of captured stasis, with allusions to geological breakdown, problems of formal composition, spent violence, and geology”. This instability combined with stasis is referenced by invoking subduction zones and geological breakdowns, through which Pirrie reminds us that we are living on borrowed time here on the BC coast, seismically speaking.
Curated by Bill Jeffries.