Slide Images
1 - Installation View
2 - Videos: Stone Cutter, 2002, and Foot, 2002
Sculptures from the series Steel/Stone, Bronze/Stone
3 - Earth (1977– ) Installation View No. 1
4 - Inventory (1977–2003)
Sculptures from the series Steel/Stone, Bronze/Stone, and Conjunctions
5 - Sculptures from the Series' Steel/Stone, Bronze/Stone, and Conjunctions
6 - From the series: Notations (Trees), 2002–2003
7 - From the series: Notations (Trees), 2002–2003
8 - From the series: Notations (Trees), 2002–2003
The Inventories of Invention, 2003
Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal, Quebec
Curated by Irena Murray
Installation view from Exhibition titled The Inventories 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." (1)
(1) Irena Murray, "Sylvia Safdie; The inventories of Invention", Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal, 2003,pg. 12