Exhibition Dates: September 18 – October 23, 2021
Scott Conarroe in attendance: Saturday, September 18, 2021, 11am – 6pm
To book your visit, or to attend the opening day, please visit here.
The gallery is pleased to present “Oberland”, our fifth solo exhibition of work by Canadian photographer Scott Conarroe.
“Oberland” is a suite of winterscapes taken from the Berner Oberland. These Alps lie west of Switzerland's geographical middle, north of the Rhone watershed, and south and east from the federal-not-capital city of Bern. Sherlock Holmes fell to his death over Reichenbach Falls there. Thomas Cook took the first international package tour to its Jungfrau Glacier. Some call it the birthplace of skiing, although archeological evidence indicates that people have slid on planks for millennia. Its 210 lifts fan out across 100 kilometres. It is a substantial winter region kept low-key by dispersal.
While perusing discussions of winterscapes, Conarroe found this passage in a text on structuralism: “When a European gazes at a snowscape and sees only snow, an Inuit, with over fifty words for snow sees a very different landscape” (John Storey, 1993). Europeans' conception of snow has been radically understated. English ski parlance alone has a dozen terms for fresh, fluffy snow. Beyond those are regionalisms, the jargons of other fields, and varieties of snow that are not fresh and fluffy.
