Artist Talk with Deb Silver

The UFV School of Creative Arts and The Reach Gallery Museum are excited to host an artist talk with Deb Silver on Tuesday, March 15, 2022, from 1:00-2:00 pm via Zoom.

Fraser Valley-based artist Deb Silver is currently featured at The Reach Gallery Museum, with a solo exhibition titled Feet Deep in Wet Earth and Watery Pools, on view from January 28 – April 7, 2022.

Silver seeks to combine and harmonize Coast Salish cultural teachings and scientific enquiry as they relate to plant knowledge, ecology, and analogue photography. Central to her practice is her deep respect for the more-than-human world. Silver is committed to establishing and maintaining respectful relationships with her plant subjects, always introducing, and explaining herself as she approaches with the intention to photograph.

For her most recent body of work, from which the exhibition takes its name, Silver specifically sought to link plants, root systems, waterways, and lichen together in a single photo series documenting intimate landscapes in Pelhó’lhxw territory (eastern Chilliwack). Using a Mamiya RB67 medium format film camera, the artist captures in great detail the cracks, bumps, and indents that comprise the unique beauty of each plant represented. For these photographs, Silver draws on traditional Stó:lō practices of using lichen as a base for coloured dyes, and combines this with knowledge gleaned from horticultural research and a scientific method of trial and error. The results are intimate, evocative portraits of forests and undergrowth in her home territory of S’ólh Téméxw (the Fraser Valley).

This project is presented alongside a reconfigured version of Silver’s multi-image photographic installation Their Words Echo Through My Core (2018), produced for her BFA program at the University of the Fraser Valley. This is the first opportunity for these two projects to be displayed together, with the earlier project providing insight into Silver’s ongoing interest and exploration into the relationship between photography and land and plant knowledge.

Feet Deep in Wet Earth and Watery Pools is one of the selected exhibitions for the 2022 Capture Photography Festival.

Everyone is welcome to join the artist talk.

Please register for this event through Eventbrite