The co-existence of humans and nature is by turns fragile, tense, sublime, and occasionally beautiful—but rarely mutual. Oil spills, overbuilding, and overpopulation have made that imbalance difficult to ignore. *The Last Frontier*, curated by Sarah Fillmore at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, takes these relationships as its subject without forcing them into argument. Before reaching the main galleries, visitors encounter *Akousmaflore* by Scenocosme, a hanging mass of plants that responds to human touch through a digital interface—each plant producing its own tone when contact is made. A gentle brush of a leaf generates sound; a crowd moving through fills the hallway with overlapping tones. The plants are tamed by interaction, turned into instruments. The question that follows naturally: who, exactly, is being played. Kelly Richardson's new video work *The Erudition* moves the tension into science fiction territory. A fixed lens looks out over a barren, computer-generated field where holographic pine trees periodically flicker and fade. The title suggests foreknowledge rather than warning—a record of something already understood, already decided. Mark Bovey works from an old family ledger, enlarging and etching its fragmented handwriting and figures onto large Plexiglas sheets. Projections of shifting clouds move across the surface while the marks of industry stay fixed. The works hang in the gallery like grave markers from an early industrial past. David Askevold's 1968 work *Nova Scotia Fires* predates the exhibition's concerns by decades—gasoline lit on the beaches of Nova Scotia, filmed and left to speak for itself. It remains meditative and strange, easy to imagine still burning an hour's drive away. *The Last Frontier* avoids heavy-handedness, which is both its strength and its limit. The works examine and accept more than they resist. At a moment when infrastructure quietly shapes behavior before anyone thinks to object—when the built environment encodes its own politics in advance of any decision—passive examination starts to feel like a position of its own.
Year: 2011
Clients: Canadian Art
Category: Writing