Burn
Robert Wiens
September 5 - October 4, 2025
Opening Reception Friday September 5, 7-10pm
Artist Talk with Robert Wiens on Saturday September 20 at 1:30pm.
from Robert Wiens:
Burn travels in many directions. It is heat, fire and pain, the end of some things and new beginnings as well. It is the worry of boreal fires and how bad they might become, and yet weirdly there is the anticipation of a flower that lasts for a day, a migrant from a southern place. It is the loss of land and water source and the feeling of that being taken away, a whole ecosystem lost to avarice. It is a camera that recorded so much of our world turned off, obsolete. That is a burn too. And what of the institute, is it lost and fading in the haze? Or can a new and different one arise, the way a forest does, from the ashes.
My original intention was to produce a diverse body of work. Each piece would stand completely on its own without reference to anything beside it.
Burn
The first two works, Burn 3 and Burn 4 were taken from images of old growth pines that had been in a forest fire on the shores of the west arm of Lake Temagami. A pair. Already my objective had been broken. These works set the tone however, of what would follow, and through a hot, dry summer when smoke from forest fires in the boreal forest reached southern Ontario, I kept coming back to the idea of Burn.
Headwaters
Another kind of burn seemed to be happening closer to home where a slated 1600 home development would sit adjacent to the headwaters of Warings Creek, the only cold water stream in Prince Edward County. Underlying the Headwaters paintings, a battle looms between development and environment.
Magnolia Tripetala, Pod
Of the two hundred plus species of the Magnolia genus worldwide, eight are native to North America. The Umbrella magnolia (Magnolia tripetala) is commonly found in Appalachia. Fourteen years ago I received a seedling of this tree from a botanist friend, Gerald Waldron, who collected the seed in the Ohio River valley. This tree now flowers every year and has produced viable seed on its own. Did it survive because it was in a sheltered spot or was a warming climate the reason it thrived?
Copy
Copy is a watercolour of a deteriorating image produced on a fax machine 28 years ago. The fax machine was used to copy a test polaroid of a photograph of an image on a television screen. The image was made with a video camera focused on a static sculpture of a model of an American fighter jet set in a desert landscape. The original jet plane model, made of carved wood is approximately the same size as the one in the watercolour.
Portage
A lake which can only be reached by portage.
Left, Camera
Left: A painting of a sculpture
Camera: A sculpture of a camera.
Painted from a small scale model constructed with wood and clay.
Guessowii
The Amanita muscaria mushroom is most often recognized as having a red cap with white flecks, but in eastern North America the cap tends to be yellow with white flecks. Amanita muscaria var. guessowii recognizes the Canadian botanist Hans Güssow who first made record of it.
– Robert Wiens, August 2025