What does it feel like to be surrounded by magnified crystal forms and layers beneath the surface, to imagine deep time and possible futures? Carol Wallace’s practice is centred on a deep respect and understanding of Earth stemming from her former career as a geoscientist. Her work is informed by earth’s ongoing processes, unimaginable timescales, and our complex relationship with the geologic materials incorporated into our daily lives. Give or Take a Few Million Years is an immersive experience of geological phenomena. Utilizing textiles, sculpture, drawings, video projection, and sound, this exhibition offers an immersive and sensory experience of deep time. The work invites the viewer to experience textures, patterns and processes found right under foot providing a personal and intimate connection to the story of Earth.

Entering the Central Gallery, a series of printed silk-organza panels create an immersive subsurface environment within the gallery. Enveloped in a story of earth’s past, the panels depict 400-million-year-old fossils, volcanic breccia, cross-cutting veins, a meandering river, and ductile deformation created from forces and extreme heat kilometres below the surface. On the floor, three metal cylinders contain backlight transparent geologic images, complimented by a series of fabric wrapped and stitched wire armatures that form rocks floating within the space. On the wall biomorphic forms made with epoxy clay are attached to the fractured surface of cobbles shaped by tens of thousands of years of erosion. These imagined adaptations of synergistic relationships appear as a community; something unexpected is growing out of something broken. Emerging around the corner, samples of thin sections from local rocks viewed under a petrographic microscope are projected on the gallery wall at a scale over 1000 times their natural size. This interlocking mosaic of crystals formed under extreme pressure and temperature at 10-15 km deep, 170 million years ago. It is a glimpse of melted continent and ocean floor; a result of two converging tectonic plates, one subsiding beneath the other. Moving through the exhibition is an invitation to move through space and time, from the very large to the very small, and to consider our (very recent) place in geologic time.

Rocks are visible evidence of earlier worlds going back more than 4 billion years. The stories archived in the rocks illustrate the ongoing recycling of matter. They provide a document of the atmospheres that were created, oceans which opened and closed, mountains as they formed and eroded, and the microorganisms that evolved into life as we know it today. Rock is time in material form. Every rock outcrop, boulder, and pebble contains multiple histories of time and place, which continue to unfold well into the future – we are transient within stones duration. Give or Take a Few Million Years encourages us to consider the agency of stone – humanity’s first tools as well as early human history depicted on stone in imagery, writing, monuments, and art. Precious metals and critical minerals have lured humans, leading to ongoing conquests, slavery, and capital while our communities are constructed of stone buildings, walls, and foundations. On a local level, our settlement locations are determined by proximity to desired minerals. After all, it was mining wealth that helped to build the 1911 Courthouse building that now houses the GFAG. Geology dictates where fertile soils are found, literally leading to feast or famine while our north-south trending lakes are located along major north-south trending geologic faults. Ultimately, human movements and activities have always been influenced by stone. Can an embodied understanding of deep time and geologic systems lead to more connection and collaboration with earth, beyond anthropocentrism? 

This project was generously funded by The Canada Council for the Arts and the Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance / Columbia Basin Trust.