Tod Emel A Forest

Curator, Leah Taylor

OPENING RECEPTION
Friday, February 15 At 7:00pm 
ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE
January 15 - February 15, 2019 

Tod Emel’s new body of work A Forest was created in response to the decimation of British Columbia’s forests in the 1990s due to the Mountain Pine Beetle outbreak. Emel’s low-relief woodcut drawings utilize mark-making to reflect pattern recognition from the beetle-altered landscape of his youth, having grown up surrounded by the boreal forest and forest industry of British Columbia. A Forest points to the larger effects of the Athropocene, concerning the human impact and interference on the forest’s natural ecology, which was ultimately the cause of the Mountain Pine Beetle outbreak.

Employing hot, acid and ice cream colours in the works, Emel’s aesthetics and ethics are closely tied to punk, DIY and skate countercultures. His artistic vocabulary is a culmination of mediums and influences, interrelating through his investigations into psychedelia (literally mind-manifesting), transcendence, self-realization and the natural world. The works in this exhibition reveal Emel’s flexibility to fluidly move between materials and media, with a primary concern to transmit the energy of the idea through pulsating sound and colour.