Z Art Space is pleased to present Deconstructions, a group exhibition featuring the works of Canadian artists Sarah Bertrand-Hamel, Brandon Dalmer and Megan Moore. This exhibition delves into the in-depth approach of each artist to unpack and reimagine their respective mediums - paper assemblage, painting, and photography - in order to re-examine the origins of such media and their potential for new meaning. Through subversive techniques, these artists share a common interest in fragmenting and re-contextualizing traditional techniques and asserting contemporary relevance in light of evolving digital methods. 

Working primarily with the medium of paper, Sarah Bertrand-Hamel is inspired by its material transformations and renewed potentialities through reconstruction. Driven by notions of transition and perpetual movement, Bertrand-Hamel pursues the unceasing emergence of beings and matters that are integrating into one another to exist in new forms. Working at the intersection of paper-making, drawings and sculptures, and often employing a variety of mundane materials, such as ropes and fishing nets, her more recent practice revolves around the metamorphosis of plants - from growth to decay - as means to get closer to the source of the fibres that she uses in her works. 

Brandon Dalmer’s painting practice investigates the correlation between the digital and physical realms by exploring the impact of the artificial on our sense of perception. As the artist points out: “Digital information can be endlessly copied, transferred and manipulated with little to no material cost and at a faster rate than the analog; then, what is lost through this process?” Developing his own systems of code to procedurally generate and manipulate digital compositions, Dalmer seeks to convert the digital medium back to a physical one, and in doing so, encourages the viewer to unpack the origins of an image.

Using a subversive photographic language, Megan Moore examines the relationship between photography, nostalgia, grief and time. By repurposing and manipulating imagery gathered from personal archives, Moore hints at the role of decay and preservation inherent within lens-based mediums. This digital image making practice pulls from analog alternative photographic processes in an effort to regain the sense of contingency typically lost within digital methods, while offering immersive and contemplative video and photography installations.