STEVEN NEDERVEEN | LIGHT PLAY
August 10 - 25, 2018
3045 Granville St, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday August 10, 2-4 pm
The horizon — the focus of Steven Nederveen’s upcoming exhibition Light Play —is at once both the line where the earth and the sky appear to meet and the limit of a person's mental perception or experience. Engaging with this semantic duality, Nederveen’s panels, too, presents a horizon: the boundary at which the artist and audience make contact.
A measure of scale, time, and distance, the horizon traces a perspective path to meet the eye, marking the level at which the world intersects with the viewer’s gaze. In this body of work, Nederveen subverts this visual formula, displacing the viewer to provoke a deeper scrutiny of the material surface in order to resolve one’s own relation to the picture plane.
As part of his ongoing exploration of the natural environment and the landscape tradition, Nederveen’s evolving practice incorporates photographic technique, painterly brushstrokes and gestural mark-making. The artist’s multi-layered process explores these sites of exchange with in-depth studies of water, panoramic vistas of sky, and immersive scenes of the liminal space between.
The fraught interplay of crashing waves, sea spray, atmospheric dust and refracted light, set against billowing clouds and washes of mountains and coastlines in the distance — is at once mystical and material, static and dynamically changeable, fleeting yet constant. Nederveen’s treatment of his subject matter lends itself to this contextual tension, distressing to transform, obscuring to reveal, and abstracting the representational to invoke the timeless power of the sublime, each painting an invitation to look to the horizon and bear witness to this elemental play.