Co.Lab Gallery presents
BETTY CARPICK | JULIE COSGROVE
A RECORD OF TIME
Opening Friday, January 16, 2025, 6-9pm
Exhibition continues until Jan 23rd, 2025.
Centring around McVicar Creek’s wild, hybrid, and built spaces, two years of rambling and making handmade art materials is captured in a time, data, and land-based work. The installation replicates the creek’s flow while playing with scale, fluidity, transparencies and layers, surface materials, mark-making elements and the elusiveness of natural colours. The intention of the project is to encourage others to pause, notice, and ponder the relationships between wild, built, and hybrid environments along an urban waterway.
As Julie and Betty worked together - from Western and Indigenous contexts respectively - they considered ways to re-centre art to connect with each other and to the lands around us. In this two-year long process-led project, they rambled over 50 kilometres around McVicar Creek to collectively and collaboratively document real and imagined transitions and moments in time by using handmade art materials, photography, mapping, and navigation tools.
Julie Cosgrove and Betty Carpick are mid-career artists, educators, activists, and mothers living in the Lake Superior Watershed. They’re committed to imagining new ways of considering nature to foster stewardship. Through this project, they’ll share their synchronicities and diversities through art making, process approach, knowledge-sharing, and interdisciplinary research.
Julie Cosgrove is a Francophone visual artist working predominantly in painting. She's exhibited internationally and nationally and is the recipient of numerous awards. Her experiences as a canoe and kayak guide in remote areas of the James Bay watershed in Northwestern Ontario are a central influence. Julie’s affinity with the subtle shifts in traveling with the land are integrated into exploring abstraction and weaving ideas of landscape, mapping, and navigation. Her large-scale compositions consider place and space through composition, colour, line, layering and depth. As an artist, collaborator, educator, juror, and board member, she’s contributed to many arts organizations. Since 2021, she’s been creating and conducting hands-on workshops with various ages with the Community Arts Heritage Education Project.
Betty Carpick grew up constantly engaging and playing in the natural world in far northern Manitoba. The interdisciplinary and intergenerational ways that she makes art and offers stewardship are shaped by her Cree and Eastern European upbringing. Her family’s lived experience with the permanent devastation of the Seal River watershed amplifies how she uses art to hold conversations. As a land-based artist, educator, activist, and community-arts practitioner, much of her work looks at social, cultural, and environmental issues by creating art that exists in the space between process and performance as well as the missing portions between the real and the imagined. The provenance of the plants and water for her handmade one-of-a-kind and one-time inks as well as incorporating life skills such as hand sewing, and repair are integral to her practice.
