Flor y Canto (Flower and Song)

Art Gallery of Swift Current, 2024

There is the surface. Now think – or rather feel, intuit – what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way. Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, fantasy. 

– Susan Sontag

In this body of work, Gabriela García-Luna probes the fleeting and the elusive. Using a blend of digital collage, drawing, mark making, and sculpture, the artist layers photographic images of plants from places she has called home; Saskatchewan and Mexico. The works are not concerned with representing what we consider “reality” but rather with highlighting the intangible, impermanent, and fragile parts of human experience – arguably, the places where existence becomes meaningful.

In speaking of her work, García-Luna offers the notion, “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” Greek philosopher Heraclitus coined that phrase to articulate his theory that nothing is permanent except change. Following that thought, this work welcomes us to look beneath the surface of life’s river and recognize both the seen and the unseeable as we embrace what cannot be held. Though it may seem at odds, the moments that shape our memories – the constant of change – is integral to finding our home places.

Art Gallery of Swift Current
April 12 – June 7, 2024


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