UNews - building materials

Logan pulls inspiration from Norse mythology

trevor.kenney — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:19:31 +0000

Darcy Logan's newest installation, Knowing/Gnawing, in the Helen Christou Gallery, presents his most recent paintings alongside a selection of works from the U of L collection, which provide context and inspiration for his art practice.

"The works are by Canadian artists including Alan Harding MacKay, Rebecca Anweiler, Renee Van Halm, William MacDonnell and Jerome Witvleit," says Logan, who earned his Bachelor of Fine arts in Art at the U of L in 2002 and is the curator at the Bowman Arts Centre.

"I wanted the exhibition to be about bodies of artistic work."

In addition to paintings, Logan also included a set of nine altered encyclopedias, which were made specifically for this exhibition, to work conjointly with the MacKay books as a way to 'read' the exhibition.

"It was important to have this reading mediated not by traditional didactics, but by altered books as re-contextualized bodies of knowledge," says Logan. "My current body of work, entitled Know/Gnaw/Naglfar, uses myth as a metaphor to explore the nature of knowledge and ideas.

"In Scandinavian mythology, the Naglfar is a ship being constructed in the underworld and the name is Old Norse for "nail ferry," which speaks to the rivets that hold the planks together, and a description of its mythic purpose."

It seems the building materials for this ship are the fingernails and toenails of the dead, the detritus of the body.

"When enough discordant people have died and the necessary amount of raw material gathered, the ship will be completed, freed from its moorings, and carry the forces of chaos to ensure the end of the world," he says. "This story provoked a string of associations for me, and gave me pause to reflect on how knowledge and ideologies are defined and constructed, and, ultimately, the consequences that follow in their wake. These are often disastrous, and result from the excesses of philosophical and ideological certainty, or the dangerous limits of knowledge."

In keeping with the myth, Logan's works contain human fingernails and toenails, embedded in the paint.

"My works are as much assemblages as they are paintings," he says. "I use layers of encrusted earth, resins and rusting agents to create the finished pieces. I often carve into the drying mud, leaving parts depressed and others in high relief. I am interested in compositional tension and attempt to explore and exploit normally incongruous elements on the canvas."

These elements can be the tensions between the thick, matte appearance of the mud and the thin reflective quality of resin, the tension between illusionist representation and passages of implied abstract space, or the tension between the modern and primitive nature of the materials.

Knowing/Gnawing is in the Helen Christou Gallery until Jan. 3, 2010.

Cinema Politica film tonight in Galileo's

trevor.kenney — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:27:16 +0000

The Lethbridge Public Interest Research Group is screening the film, Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai, Tuesday night, 7 p.m. in Galileo's Gallery.

Everyone is welcome to attend this free event, a part of the Cinema Politica documentary film series, screening every Tuesday in Galileo's.

Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai is a 79-minute film that tells the dramatic story of Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai, whose simple act of planting trees grew into a nationwide movement to safeguard the environment, protect human rights, and defend democracy; a movement for which this charismatic woman became an iconic inspiration.

FULL SYNOPSIS

Planting trees for fuel, shade, and food is not something that anyone would imagine as the first step toward winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet with that simple act Wangari Maathai, a woman born in rural Kenya, started down the path that reclaimed her country's land from 100 years of deforestation, provided new sources of food and income to rural communities, gave previously impoverished and powerless women a vital political role in their country, and ultimately helped to bring down Kenya's twenty-four-year dictatorship.

Taking Root weaves a compelling and dramatic narrative of one woman's personal journey in the context of the turbulent political and environmental history of her country. Raised in the rural highlands of Kenya, educated in the United States during the 1960s civil rights era, and the first female to receive a PhD in East Africa, Maathai discovered the heart of her life's work by reconnecting with the rural women with whom she had grown up. They told her that their daily lives had become intolerable: they were walking longer distances for firewood, clean water had become scarce, the soil was disappearing from their fields, and their children were suffering from malnutrition. Maathai thought to herself, "Well, why not plant trees?" Trees provide shade, prevent soil erosion, supply firewood and building materials, and produce nutritious fruit to combat malnutrition. With this realization Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots organization encouraging rural women to plant trees.

Maintaining the Wall a team effort

trevor.kenney — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:22:09 +0000

The Bio Wall is just one of the many outstanding features of the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge's new Alberta Water and Environmental Science Building but it may be its most distinguishable.

The structure is approximately 12 metres (three stories) tall and four metres wide, featuring a wide array of plants that literally grow out of the wall. The look and feel of the Bio Wall is both stunning and calming. The trick is keeping the plants healthy and that includes a combination of modern technology and human ingenuity.

Technologically, the patented Natureaire system developed by Alan Darlington of the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Guelph, is what keeps the plants hydrated. The wall itself consists of common house plants, such as the rubber fig, the peace lily and umbrella plants, which are placed into slits in the first layer of a two layer wall comprised of porous synthetic material of loosely woven plastic. Over time, the roots of the plants will grow down through the layers and become enmeshed with the material. Water, occasionally infused with nutrients, is pumped to the top of the wall (with the use of six fans) and trickles down through the layers to the plant roots.

But what happens when a plant needs maintenance and just how do workers get to them? Enter the grounds crew, with a little assistance from Sport and Recreation Services, and specifically, Scott Whiteside and his climbing wall staff. They helped instruct Vern Leckie's grounds crew in the Facilities department, about six in total, on basic climbing technique so that they could repel down the wall and provide maintenance to the plants.

Under the supervision of a climbing wall staffer, one member of the grounds crew, which to date has meant Tyler Fallwell, repels down the wall, pulling out old and dying material and replacing it with new flora supplied by Lethbridge's Touch of Green plant shop. The operation is carried out monthly and keeps the Bio Wall looking its best and functioning well.

The benefits of the Bio Wall are more than visual, they also include the breakdown of indoor air pollutants, such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from common building materials and electronics, which can cause 'sick-building syndrome.'

The Bio Wall also offers increased humidity in addition to the associated psychological and aesthetic benefits.

UNews - building materials

Logan pulls inspiration from Norse mythology

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Cinema Politica film tonight in Galileo's

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Maintaining the Wall a team effort

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