Skew Gallery is pleased to present its second solo exhibition for contemporary artist Laura Millard. In her recent series of abstract waterfall paintings Millard continues to challenge the boundaries between traditional notions of painting and photography.

Growing up in Alberta, Millard has been visually impacted by the rapidly receding glaciers of the Columbia Icefields. Utilizing state of the art photographic equipment, Millard captures this rush of time where static ancient ice melts and transforms into waterfalls that release energy, movement, light and space.

Her process begins with her split-second photographic captures taken from a macro perspective. Her research includes frequent trips to the ice fields, considering both the time of day and time of year, to maximize prisms that result from the interplay of light with each falling water droplet. The large-format photographs, comprised of various planes of light and shadow, become the ground for Millard's painting. With sustained looking and careful re-consideration of the photographed image Millard begins her methodical brushwork and traditional painting techniques to bring forward what photography cannot do alone. The resulting new media artworks depict the definitive photographed moment in time, but go beyond this, to include the precious and fleeting dance of light that ricochets from each water droplet that is seen through the eyes of an artist, but still remains elusive to photographic technology.

Laura Millard was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1961. Before completing her MFA at Concordia University, Montreal, she received a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Her work has been widely exhibited across Canada and has been collected by corporations such as TD Bank, RBC, Fidelity Investments, as well as the Glenbow Museum, Department of Foreign Affairs and Canada Council Art Bank. Millard recently presented the series "Contrail" in a solo exhibition in Beijing, China. Conflating photography with the meticulous, time consuming act of hand rendering, Millard's images blur their readability and slow down the act of looking. She continues to collect her source imagery from the Alberta landscape, but maintains her studio practice in Toronto, Ontario.