Main Gallery
Flux
Kelsey Stephenson
January 14, 2022 – February 26, 2022
Kelsey Stephenson’s exhibition, Flux, uses images from along the North Saskatchewan, Athabasca, and Bow rivers to create imagined landscapes of disparate places – one view may encompass everything from the Saskatchewan glacier to the riverbank in Edmonton. Imagery and sounds have been taken from dissimilar times and places and brought together as a whole made from many parts.
The sonic Flux is composed of field recordings taken near (or at the same time as) many of the images. One speaker remains on a very long, slow cycle throughout, while the others play a randomized selection of shorter sounds and silences. This mix of set and changing sounds echoes the river itself; its overall course is more settled, but the encounters along the way remain changeable. The sound is meant to create contrast and similarity against the background white noise in the gallery, sometimes playing too softly to notice and at other times drawing attention, bringing the river flowing into the space.
Our own experience of the river is but one small part of the entire watershed, and as one part of a system of interconnected parts – now more than ever, it is essential to think about human impacts up and downstream.
—
Kelsey Stephenson is an Edmonton (amiskwacîwâskahikan) based artist working with ideas of place-based memory and identity and the changes imposed on the landscape through human agency. Her recent projects encompass installation and multimedia, utilizing printmaking as a jumping-off point. She has exhibited work in solo exhibitions across Canada and the USA; some recent group exhibitions include The 5th Bangkok Triennial International Print and Drawing Competition, Bangkok Art and Culture Center, Thailand, the 37th Bradley International, at Bradley University (Illinois, USA), and the 2018 Okanagan Print Triennial, in Kelowna, BC.
Stephenson holds a Master’s in Fine Art from the University of Tennessee and a Bachelors of Design from the University of Alberta. She has previously taught courses in printmaking at the Alberta University of the Arts (formerly known as Alberta College of Art + Design) and currently teaches at the University of Alberta.
Produced with the support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts (individual artist project grants, 2019).