Slide Images
01 - Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal, 2003
Video titled Foot, 2002
Installation view of Earth (1977 - )
A continuous work of collecting earth from many different parts of the world. Each bowl contains earth from a unique place. The material has been collected by the artist and a number of others who have contributed to the project.
02 - Videos: Stone Cutter, 2002, and Foot, 2002
Sculptures from the series Steel/Stone, Bronze/Stone
03 - Sculptures from the series Steel Stone, Bronze/ Stone and Conjunctions
04 - Inventory (1977 - ), videos: oil lamps, 2003 and Flame, 2003
05 - Inventory (1977 - )
06 - From the series: Notations (trees), 2002 - 2003
07 - From the series: Notations (trees), 2002 - 2003
08 - From the series: Notations (trees), 2002 - 2003
Inventory of Invention, 2003
Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal, Quebec
Installation view from Exhibition titled Inventory of Invention, curated by Irena Murray at the Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montréal, 2003
"Over the years, inventories of the natural world have furnished the context, if not the content, of Sylvia Safdie's art: a wall-mounted syllabary of stones, petrified leaves, spidery roots, nests, seashells, bones, discarded carapaces, driftwood, fossils, giant seeds, pods, husks and crusts (cat.2, 52); a multi-hued thesaurus of soils gathered from all over the globe; a lexicon of images that apprehends nature in the sometimes barely perceptible passage of time through the still eye of a camera."
"[...] Safdie's drive is to interpret forms removed from their place of origin in order to reveal both their singularity within and their kinship with the world of nature and the world of signs, with both taxonomy and semantics."*
*Irena Murray, "Sylvia Safdie; The inventory of Invention", Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal, 2003,pg. 12