PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts is pleased to present, in her Winnipeg debut exhibition, “Your face, like a lone nocturnal garden in Worlds where Suns spin round!”, by Toronto-based artist Susy Oliveira.

OPENING RECEPTION | Friday 12 March 7PM

ARTIST TALK | Saturday 13 March, 3PM

WORKSHOP | Guerilla Gardening 101 | Saturday 10 April 2010, 3PM

EXHIBITION RUN | 12 March - 24 April 2010

Oliveira’s practice fuses photography, sculpture, poetry and architecture in order to create moments of suspended belief and face questions regarding loneliness, beauty, and the environment in which we find ourselves. This most recent body of work examines the human preoccupation of re-producing nature with fabrications, as we attempt to possess and feel closer to the pleasures it offers without dealing with any of its potential discomforts.

“Your face, like a lone nocturnal garden in Worlds where Suns spin round!” is a body of work that comes together as a simulated garden.  This work intends to examine a pervasive preoccupation with replacing nature with fabricated versions of it as well as delving into ideas of digital and technological reproduction. By definition, the garden — complete with its natural components — is a construction made for our own pleasure and consumption. The title for this exhibition is taken from Jean Genet’s novel Our Lady of the Flowers a passage in which he is referring to a fictional lover.  In Genet’s quote, the character — Genet himself — is fantasizing about a man with whom he has never had any real contact. He fictionalizes a relationship that seems to draw up emotions that are as intense if not more intense than if the relationship was actual. For this project, I hope to translate the feelings of wonder and awe that Genet relates in this one sentence into my fictional garden.

– Susy Oliveira, Artist Statement 2009