Inside the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, you’ll find a record of Julya Hajnoczky‘s wild pandemic year. The exhibition, on to April 20, features recent selections from the Calgary-based artist’s ongoing project, “portraits of ecosystems” that she captures with a photographic scanner.
On the surface, each image is an assemblage of organic bits and bobs that she’s gathered from a specific location in western Canada — a tangle of seagrass from Pacific Rim National Park or sprigs of flowers picked near the coulees in southern Alberta. But there’s an element of fantasy too, as her field samples appear to be unaffected by gravity, suspended in an inky void like deserted islands floating in limbo.
Hajnoczky describes the effect as being even more striking when the images appear as matte prints. (At the Whyte, the largest selections are 54 inches tall.) “I’m not necessarily an…
