Elizabeth MacKenzie

This series explores the ecological and political significance of invasive species proliferation in relation to settler colonialism, a colonial project that sought to usurp and displace Indigenous People from their labour, land and resources.

Invasive species are any kind of living organism not native to an ecosystem that causes harm to the local ecology. I am currently focused on plants with names associated with the countries of my ancestry (e.g. Scotch Broom, Scotch Thistle, English Ivy). These drawings feature iconic images of the plants disrupted by extraneous gestures and marks.

An ongoing engagement with ambivalence is reflected in the materials and processes I use within these drawings. I want to interrupt representation and create tension between a physical gesture and the illusion it creates.

This wall drawing was produced as part of Leaning Out of Windows (LOoW), an interdisciplinary project that, “aims to explore how artists might work with scientists to develop a shared understanding of how knowledge can be translated across their disciplinary communities.”

In their introduction to this project, organizers Ingrid Koenig and Randy Lee Cutler explained that the German expression for interdisciplinarity, “aus dem Fenster lehnen,” roughly translates as, “leaning out of the window.”

The first stage of this endeavour began in January 2017, with a series of seminar presentations by physicists on the subject of antimatter, at TRIUMF, Canada’s particle accelerator centre.

Shortly after attending the seminar I began a series of drawings based on the Dirac equation, developed by British physicist Paul Dirac in 1928, which predicted the existence of antimatter—the mirror image of ordinary matter. Equations make me think of hieroglyphs—they’re mysterious and cryptic messages that I know carry meaning, but this meaning is impenetrable to me.

For the LOoW exhibition, which took place at Emily Carr University from Jan 26 - Feb 8, 2018, I produced a wall-drawing, which allowed me one final opportunity to handle the Dirac equation. I used powdered graphite applied with brushes to represent a large, out-of-focus, mirrored image of the equation.

Through the course of my participation in the LOoW project, I drew this equation over and over again. While my work failed to wrest the equation’s particular meaning—the play of materiality and gesture I undertook is not unlike the work of experimental physicists, concerned with the observation of physical phenomena.

People often mistake the concern of art and science with the production of things. While both may lead to the production things, they are first and foremost methods of inquiry—their processes allow us to understand and appreciate the universe and our place within it.

Seymour Art Gallery: Sept 14 - Oct 22, 2016

This exhibition presented a new series of large-scale, drawing-based digital prints investigating the problematics of self-portraiture, along with an installation that annotated my creative process within the development of this work.

I work with materials and processes that interrupt representation and create tension between a physical gesture and the illusion it creates. Rather than pursuing the idea of a portrait as a fixed, singular image I represent the face as an ambiguous, shifting field of interaction and interpretation. These transformations suggest lived experience, as well as the externalization of psychic projections. The images represent me and not-me—a process of becoming and unbecoming.

The prints were presented along the back wall of the gallery, visible before entering the space. After entering the gallery and turning away from the prints two installations became visible on the back of the two entry walls. These represented the motive and method behind the work. On one side, a collection of sketches, experiments, and fragments from past projects representing a “genealogy” of the new work. On the other side, a large mind map, rendered directly on the wall, reflected my ruminations on this project.