Paradoxically, 'The Invisibles' might be the most intensely 'visible' exhibition any of us will encounter this year. Elizabeth Thomson's recent wall-relief works play on the eye as they do the mind. Kaleidoscopic, hallucinogenic even, the works are also unaccountably 'real'. Diving into various streams of scientific inquiry, it is as if Thomson has found an artistic or imaginative synthesis between, say, the Aurora Borealis(Northern Lights) and the bark of a tree. Or the pattern and colouration of a leaf.
This kind of lyrical decoding, and re-coding, of the natural world has characterised her work since the late 1980s, but here it reaches for possibly its most intense iteration. For Thomson, the notion of the invisible or the unknowable is foundational. So, these works present as something of an unsolvable mystery. That these works are at the same time beautiful is another paradox. Maybe true beauty is dependent upon a certain elusiveness, a reticence, an opacity, an element of surprise or difficulty?
What exactly are we looking at here? Are these works a veil or halo around reality or are they a core-sample, an essence, an elixir. Thomson takes us to the cusp of the visible world and then she keeps going--into imagined, 'invisible' realms. But she never, not even for a moment, leaves this world behind. There is nothing escapist about her project. Like Cesare Pavese, her desire is 'to go on, take it further... become ever lasting, like a hill...'
Gregory O'Brien
