Marlene Creates

Marlene Creates has sensitively probed the relationship between human experience and the natural world for almost four decades, choosing a path that privileges the act over the artifact, the moment over the monument. From her early works that record her ephemeral actions in the land to her later explorations of poetry in situ in the boreal forest, and of photography as an active medium -- where, for example, the rush of water over the lens transforms the artist's own image -- Creates leads us with an environmental and cultural consciousness to a greater understanding of the natural world and our "places" in it.Under the direction of curator-critics Susan Gibson Garvey and Andrea Kunard, Marlene Creates: Places, Paths, and Pauses offers not only a broad view of her work in photography but also a critical appreciation of her multi-disciplinary approach (assemblages, memory-map drawings, and video-poems) through essays by Gibson Garvey and Kunard, photographic historian Joan M. Schwartz, nature writer Robert Macfarlane, and poet Don McKay.Marlene Creates: Places, Paths, and Pauses is designed to accompany a touring retrospective exhibition organized by the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in partnership with Dalhousie Art Gallery.