“Briana Palmer’s multi-layered installation might appear whimsical at first glance – a miniature world designed for entertainment and delight. But her references to trains, toys and childhood all have deeper, troubling meanings. Palmer grew up in Revelstoke, BC, a small city near the western edge of Canada’s colonial frontier. The railway passed through town. Towering trestles featured in everyday life. At night, the sound of rail cars crashing over the tracks soothed children to sleep in their beds. For Palmer it was a comfortable life. Troubling terms like “settler” and “colonial” only emerged for her after she left Revelstoke, gained more life experience, and began to question what she calls the “white bread” assumptions of her upbringing…”

– excerpt from exhibition essay by Sally McKay

“… Mountains are constants in the series of mixed-media prints featured in Make or Break. Green combines personal documentation of “wilderness” with appropriated and recovered images from historical travelogues and wilderness survival guides. These natural monoliths are interweaved with provisional man-made structures or supports. Dovetail cabins, lean-to shelters, hoarding, and half-constructed walls are fleetingly insubstantial containers and supports for the jagged peaks carved over many millennia.

With the sketchy incomplete rendering of these structures, Green imbues the prints with a generative ambiguity. Are these man-made incursions into mountain environments failed projects? Ambitious beginnings? Are they meant to support and preserve? Or are they fool-hardy attempts to contain and conquer? There provisional and insubstantial nature in the face of the overriding enduring mountainscape is the only clarity we receive…”

– excerpt from Deep Time Laid Bare – exhibition essay by Matthew R. Hills