Lisa Klapstock: "liminal"
Southern Alberta Art Gallery

"liminal," a mini-survey of works by Klapstock, including photos from Threshold and Ambiguous Landscapes, continues to Jan. 16 at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery.

The work of the Toronto-based artist Lisa Klapstock is all about perspective. For instance, in her photo series Threshold (1998-2002), Klapstock uncovered a macrocosm of beauty in the often-overlooked spaces and surfaces of the city's fenced-in back yards and garage-lined laneways. Shot up close through gaps or knotholes in fences, Klapstock's photos set up a push-and-pull play with the boundaries of vision as the blurred, abstract surfaces of the fences give way to focused, near-telescopic glimpses on to private back yard worlds.

Her latest work, Ambiguous Landscapes, picks up where Threshold left off. The series consists of large-scale photo diptychs, one is a tightly-framed empty landscape—granite stairs, a grassy field, a snowy slope—while the other shows the same scene, only this time with a figure added for scale. By installing the pairs separately in the gallery, Klapstock sets up what she calls a "temporal gap" between the works. Perspective in the empty landscape is deceptively limited until its double (with figure) reveals the view's surprisingly larger and true scale.