Welcome to my newsletter! You’re receiving this email because you signed up online or at an event (IDS Vancouver or Artist Project Toronto), or you requested updates from me about my work. Some of you (long-time friends, relatives, friends of the family) are protesting, “I didn’t sign up for this!”…I’m sorry, I added you to my mailing list with flagrant disregard for spam laws. If you prefer to receive updates elsewhere, or not at all, you can unsubscribe at any time - no hard feelings!

Otherwise read on for news about upcoming shows, some new projects I’ve been working on, and a sneak peek at where the Alfresco Science Machine will take me this field season!

Upcoming show: Artist Project in Toronto

I’ll be showing at Artist Project again this year, and I’ll be bringing some of the work I made in June during my Parks Canada residency at Point Pelee National Park, and some smaller bird prints as well. The show runs April 13th to 16th at the Better LIving Centre at Exhibition Place. You can find more info about show times and tickets here, and if you’d like complimentary passes I have some to give away so please drop me a note - I’ll give a pair to the first 5 people who can tell me which Great Lake Point Pelee juts into.

Very Exciting News: Canada Council Art Bank acquires my work

I was absolutely thrilled to learn earlier this year that one of my pieces, Monotropa uniflora 2, was among 72 works selected for acquisition by the Canada Council Art Bank as part of their 50th anniversary celebrations. The call to artists, the first since 2011, received 1748 submissions, so needless to say it was a wonderful surprise to get the news that my work was chosen. You can read about the purchase and see the list of the other artists whose work was selected in the press release here.

I’m going to Iceland!

Workshop: Ströndin Studio, Seyðisfjörður, Iceland

Instead of getting the Alfresco Science Machine out first thing in spring this year, I’ll be heading to Iceland for Nætursól – NightSun,  an alternative processes in photography workshop taught by Dianne Bos and Sarah Fuller of the Institute of Unusual Studies. I’m so excited to spend a week with a really great group of artists, to get back in the darkroom (it’s been ages!) and to build pinhole cameras, make cyanotypes, lumens, anthotypes, and lots more. I’ve never been to Iceland, so if you have suggestions for what to see around Reykjavík or Seyðisfjörður, camper rental companies you liked, or great restaurants to try, I’d love to hear them!

New Project: It’s a Bad Time to be a Pine

One reason I wanted to take the workshop in Iceland is to tune up my pinhole camera building skills for this new project. I received an Alberta Foundation for the Arts 50th Anniversary Grant to spend 3 weeks out in the field in William A. Switzer and Sir Winston Churchill Provincial Parks and Jasper National Park, studying the epidemic of the Mountain Pine Beetle in Alberta’s northern forests. When bark beetles attack a tree, they make hundreds of tiny holes in the bark, before excavating all kinds of elaborate tunnels under the bark, ultimately killing the tree. I’ll be collecting samples of this tree bark, and building pinhole cameras using these pieces as the front element, where the holes pierced by the beetles will be the pinholes. These cameras will be used at the locations where the bark was collected, photographing the affected forests, and eco-friendly film developing processes will be used to process the images on site. While the pinhole cameras will be documented, they will be dismantled and left in situ to avoid transporting beetles and larva to new locations. These beetles and the thousands of dead trees they leave behind, covered in the elaborate patterns of holes and tunnels that the beetles carve into the wood when they attack the trees, will all eventually decompose and disappear from sight. This project is a way of marking this extraordinary phenomenon in our province, and a way of documenting, sharing, and even grieving and mourning the unprecedented loss of these forests. I’ll be posting about this on the Alfresco Science Machine’s instagram account so stay tuned for project updates!

New work: Back to making tiny, fussy, impossibly detailed things out of paper

How can we ever recreate a forest? With this work, like a lot of things I make, I’m musing about our assumptions and (misplaced) faith in Western Science’s ability to ever understand a forest well enough to rebuild it or restore it once it has been damaged by human activity. I made this piece for a group show in the Crescent Heights Mini-Galleries for the Exposure Photography Festival this year. These are a really cool initiative by the Crescent Heights Community Association, and are kind of like Little Free Libraries, but with art exhibited inside. At 11”x15”x3” this piece just fit into the space. I felt like this was a great opportunity to experiment with something really different from my usual large-scale prints. This work is still derived from those images though - I printed 3 very tiny versions, and then used an exacto knife to carefully cut out the plants, fungi, etc from each photo. The resulting pieces were all mounted in a shadowbox, with the blank back of the paper facing the viewer.

New work: “it must look beautiful from up there”

I’ve been working with the Calgary Urban Species Response Team (CUSRT) here in town for a few years now. Inspired by FLAP and SafeWings, CUSRT is a volunteer organization founded in 2019 to patrol downtown during spring and fall migration, collecting birds that have struck the glass skyscrapers. Injured birds are rushed to a wildlife rehabber for treatment, while deceased specimens are recorded and stored - many of these will go on to be used in scientific study by ornithologists and other biologists in Alberta. My role has been documenting the deceased birds that are collected, which I’ve been doing using the scanner. I have a huge archive of images of individual birds, but have also been doing some closer-up shots that focus on some of the incredibly beautiful details. These are mostly tiny birds that would fit in the palm of your hand, that usually don’t even sit still for a photo or good look through the binoculars, so to be able to examine them up close through these images is pretty special. With support from Calgary Arts Development, I’m turning 10 of these bird images into lightboxes, using the grid patterns of our city’s map as a template to pierce hundreds of tiny holes in the prints. Once assembled, the light shines through the holes, creating an image that evokes a bird’s eye view of a city, from far up in the sky.

Upcoming show: Hearth Gallery, Bowen Island

Save the date, everyone! I’ll be exhibiting my work at The Hearth Gallery on Bowen Island, BC (just a quick ferry ride from Vancouver) from Sept 27th to Oct 9th, 2023. I’m sharing the gallery with another very talented artist, Lydia Miller, who creates wonderful sculptural pieces using natural materials. The opening night Artist pArty (Lydia and I will be in attendance) is Sept 30th from 6-8pm - if you’re in the area I hope you’ll come by and say hello! Prints in this exhibition will be available for purchase through The Hearth.

New website: Hair and Makeup for Food

Last but not least, if you’ve visited my website lately you may have seen that I’ve decided to move my commercial work to it’s own home. To avoid getting food on my art, my food styling work (which I always describe to people who aren’t in the industry as ‘hair and makeup, but for food’) now resides on a fancy new website, hairandmakeupforfood.com in case you are interested in seeing what I get up to when I’m not out poking around in the woods.

Thanks for reading! You can also follow along on instagram for updates, and find my work in person at Christine Klassen Gallery in Calgary. See you in the forest!

-Julya