Cobourg's Poet Laureate Ted Amsden reflects on the next exhibition at The Colborne Art Gallery

off the map

Where is where when the land underfoot reaches so far?

And who is who when you are…. so insignificant inside such hugeness?

Resourced, remade, returned, Barbara Buntin locates us precisely in mixed media space at the Colborne Art Gallery.

Her skilful answer suggesting what it is to stand in the midst of big Yukon landscape presented in 11 works of meditative art.

Print maker. Collagist. Contemplator of her human place within elemental Nature.

On the edge of a world arc. Fissured by granite. Relying on map line arteries.

Through her. To you. This is what happens when landscape enters the body.

From foot passage to brain thoughts on through voyages of feeling, it comes down to Buntin's finger tips. Going off the map. Exploring the landscape from within. Stranger in a land of her own remoteness. Reducing the harvest of her visit as some do berries. Really huge berries. Wide screen vision seduced into rectangles of mixed media.

Upon thin white textures dense with dark expression a healthy rapprochement.
The human form tropically, healthily, found resting in the midst of abstract forces.  
The equal of one's feeling in the depth of a northern vision discovered.

Our place then. Secure. Hugeness contained.

The result. Grounding. Solid. Reassuring.

by Ted Amsden

Barbara Buntin
Colborne Art Gallery
October 5 to November 10, 2013