Staggering into Gallery 1C03 out of the winter’s first real blast of “dangerous cold,” Methods of Preservation certainly feels like a refuge, but it’s an ambivalent oasis, however inviting. In her first proper solo exhibition, emerging photographer Ashley Gillanders pieces together a conservatory of simulated tropical houseplants – cut-out and curled two-sided inkjet prints of leaves and leaf fragments arranged like abstract bouquets, collapsing card towers, unruly thickets, forest debris, and scattered florist-shop trimmings. Sheltered under Plexiglas vitrines, the precariousness, incongruity, and artifice of those arrangements are unmistakable. (Speaking as another improbable transplant from the subtropics, it’s hard not to relate.) 
Ashley Gillanders, untitled (paper study #4), 2015, archival ink jet prints, mat board, Plexiglas
Like any trompe l’oeil, the sculptures invite scrutiny – you notice the carefully but plainly hand-cut edges; there’s satisfaction in spotting identical leaves – but new associations establish themselves as illusion dies back. There are parallels to be found with the ikebana’s mannered naturalism or the reductive geometries of modernist sculpture. Taken as a medium-specific investigation, though, the work suggests (perhaps without contradiction) that photography is both a robust, evolving form and a rare orchid to be cultivated and conserved.
Gillanders’s botanical imagery links Thomas Wedgwood’s unfixed 18th Century experiments (a few stray leaves may or may not survive) and William Henry Fox Talbot’s more durable “photogenic drawings” with Weston and Mapplethorpe’s sensual vegetable and floral still lifes, even as her hybrid process and its artifacts echo the uncanny potential of digital rendering and 3D texture mapping. The university setting and institutional display tactics highlight photography’s role in empiricist projects from botany to anthropology. Several sculptures loosely resemble foliated crowns and headdresses: isolated in their display cases, these perhaps unintentionally hint at the complicated cultural and ethical dimensions of “preservation.”
Made in the last year (much of it in the past few months), the work signals new growth in the artist’s practice. Her earlier photographs had examined the uneasy collision of natural and manmade landscape features with alternately detached, curious, and nostalgic attention. Untethered somewhat from that gaze, the new, freestanding constructions invite us to consider each work from different angles, even as there’s little to distract us from their loveliness.
Gallery 1C03: http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/art-gallery/programming/2015-16/ashley-gillanders-methods-of-preservation.html
Ashley Gillanders: Methods of Preservation continues until February 20.
Artist talk: February 2 at 3:30pm in Room 2M70, University of Winnipeg
Steven Leyden Cochrane is an artist, writer, and educator based in Winnipeg, but he grew up in Florida. He is Akimbo’s Winnipeg correspondent and can be followed @svlc_ on Twitter.
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Ashley Gillanders at Gallery 1C03
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