Artist Nora Camps opened her ‘CAPRICCIO. Real and Imaginary’ exhibit at the Papermill Gallery at Todmorden Mills this past Thursday night, with guest artists: Marietta Camps, MaryAnn Camps and Pamela Williams.
The title of the exhibit refers to landscape work, which can be whimsical and fantastical, even collage-like in its assembly of images. Nora Camps’ prolific work shows great variety and vibrant colour – from photography-based (like Spirited Forest, an archival photo print on canvas that combines images of women with trees), to graphic design-inspired (the Fade to Red 1-2-3 triptych) to abstract (the Open series, that bring to mind giant, intense yet benevolent eyes) to expressionistic (land/seascapes like Sound, Surf and Arriving). And she’s created several large wooden sculptures too – her take on the totem pole – and a four-minute film, a moving collage of dance clips, plays on a screen in the Papermill Theatre.
Marietta Camps, Camps’ mother and a local Vancouver Island artist, uses watercolour and oils to paint images recalled from her childhood in India. Works on display include bright and lovingly rendered portraits and landscapes.
MaryAnn Camps’ (Nora Camps’ sister) Cities at Night is a series of startling beautiful aerial perspectives – done in acrylic on canvas – of Montreal, London and Tokyo. These are the kind of magical, shimmering views you’d get if you were flying into that city at night.
Toronto Photographer Pamela Williams shows several of her remarkable black and white archival silver prints of cemetery monuments that she shot in Genoa and Rome, Italy; Paris, France; and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Both beautiful and melancholy, the marble statuary works are so masterfully sculpted – and so vividly presented in the photographs – that you would swear they could come to life at any moment.
Original music by Tom St. Louis, who sang for us at the grand piano, added to the intimate, engaging atmosphere in the Papermill Gallery – and the celebration of art and friends.
The Nora Camps and guests exhibit is up until September 7.
Here are some snaps I took from the event:
life with more cowbell 