As visitors enter the first gallery of Vancouver\u2019s Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG), they see a gigantic tapestry of a lake view on a beautiful afternoon blocked by a large boulder. Compelled to look up and gaze at the monumental piece, which takes up almost an entire wall, they encounter an acute assemblage of image-making, philosophical meditation, and material tactility that envelops all senses and suspends them in a delicate balance of the extraordinary. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The experience doesn\u2019t come as a surprise, as the Vancouver-based artist Kathy Slade has provided them with a preview: the exhibition\u2019s poetic title, As the sun disappears and the shadows descend from the mountaintop. <\/em>Like a transition scene in a Lars Von Trier movie in which nature represents an imminent complete system collapse, the sun in Slade\u2019s show descends quickly, drawing back its warmth and giving way to something haunting that might arrive with the darkness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this new body of work developed from her research trip to Sils Maria, Switzerland, the protagonist is a large boulder sitting beside Lake Silvaplana. This pyramid-shaped rock had an impact on the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche when he visited the lake in 1881.^{1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 1 <\/a> - Lisa Robert and Kathy Slade, Reading the Rock: Kathy Slade and Lisa Robertson in Conversation<\/em> (Vancouver: Contemporary Art Gallery, 2022), 17.<\/span> Reconstructing the image of the rock at a one-to-one scale in the tapestry Sinking in the West <\/em>(2022), Slade transposes the experience that both Nietzsche and she had when confronted with such a natural sublime. Across from the tapestry is a round obsidian mirror, Scrying Mirror <\/em>(2022), referencing an eighteenth-century tourist apparatus \u2013 a tinted compact mirror that was used to capture and appreciate the mighty wilderness of the Alps, similar to the black mirrors that artists once used to draw landscapes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\n