NEW TOPOGRAPHIES (2025)

March 2 – 16 2025
Upper Gallery, Canadian Geographic Building, Ottawa, Ontario
Curator: Robert Tombs

The exhibition New Topographies: Barry Pottle & Leslie Reid, held in the Upper Gallery, 50 Sussex Drive, Ottawa from March 2 to 16, 2025, combined digital photographic images by Inuk artist Barry Pottle and Settler artist Leslie Reid. Their work alluded to two epistemologies — of Western scientific method with its observations, hypotheses, and conclusions — and Indigenous holistic beliefs, comprised of more experiential knowledge and a deep connection to the natural world. As intersecting methods of critical enquiry, however, it is difficult to assess to what extent these divergent belief systems impacted each artist’s work or overflowed onto the other’s.

In New Topographies, Pottle and Reid each presented a photographic record of a climate change-imperilled hydrographic system, Reid in the Saint Elias Mountains of Yukon Territory, and Pottle in urban Ottawa. By isolating aspects of landscape in this way, they sought a ‘truth’ which situates their work within in the documentary tradition — a genre which is typically focused on direct observation — but Reid and Pottle’s images are also intended as aesthetic expressions — in line, shape, form and colour — and this permits us in the traditional sense to consider them ‘Art’.

It is also important to note that Barry Pottle — an Ottawa-based Inuk artist originally from the coastal Labrador village of Rigolet, Nunatsiavut — was invited by Ottawan Leslie Reid, RCA to exhibit alongside her in New Topographies, a consequence of their longstanding friendship and respect for each other’s work.

Curatorial Essay (Downloadable PDF)

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Client : LEORE