Cheryl Pagurek: Winter Garden at Surrey Art Gallery, 2024-2025

NK Photo, courtesy of Surrey Art Gallery

The Winter Garden interactive digital collage and Winter Garden 9 photograph will be presented at Surrey Art Gallery from July 14, 2024 – April 27, 2025.

In a reinterpretation of the still life genre, Winter Garden offers joy and solace in an age of anxiety. The viewer becomes a participant in the growth and regeneration of the interactive collage. Its concept developed out of still life photographs taken during the Winter 2021 lockdown, about a small oasis of indoor growth that evoked hope and resilience.  The collage continually renews itself, growing compositions of still life motifs against a changing backdrop of winter imagery; the collage fragments play with opacity and transparency, as well as positive and negative space.

Viewers influence the composition by their location and movement; the collage reflects the activity of the room. The build-up of imagery follows people’s positions, and its changing pace is determined by how many people are present and how much they move. One person standing still prompts the collage to evolve more slowly, concentrated in front of the viewer’s location; more motion causes the composition to change quickly. Several people moving around create a complex composition, with imagery dispersed across the screen following their trajectories. By incorporating people’s presence and actions into the construction of the collage, Winter Garden connects the surrounding area’s real space to the pictorial space within the work.

I created a new iteration of Winter Garden for the Surrey Arts Centre lobby area, tying the work even more specifically to the site of its display. The camera’s view of people and their surrounding environment is frequently incorporated into the collage for a few moments, designed to give insight into how viewers’ movements directly affect the evolving compositions, and offering an enticement to come explore further.

More information on the Surrey Art Gallery website

Article by Kristin Lim on West Coast Curated

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