Susan Whitney Gallery Presents - Lorne Beug

The Susan Whitney Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of a one person exhibition City Garden Book by Lorne Beug. The exhibition runs from March 21 to April 24, 2003. As a teenager Lorne Beug was interested equally in art and in science. Attending the University of Regina in the ‘60's, he studied anthropology and psychology and received a B.A. degree with Great Distinction. He then continued his studies in Fine Arts. The 1970's were largely devoted to ceramic sculptures. The 1980's saw the evolution of his work in the direction of combining ceramics with other materials. During the last decade he concentrated on collages: first large-scale, using as raw material photographs collected on travels locally, regionally and internationally; then, using the same material digitally to create a series of artist’s books. Throughout these many changes one of the most enduring themes of his work has been the exploration of the unseen, the underground, the interior - the landscape of the imagination. City Garden Book explores the resonances between these three terms, which are also long standing obsessions of the artist. The City has become the matrix of most of our lives. In many ways Regina is like a miniaturized version of a metropolis; as the smallest complete city, it could possibly be the Ideal City. At least, hunters of post-modern fossils and artifacts of urbanism can have a field day here. Like many people, Beug finds gardening a healthy escape. The garden seems like an intermediary between the city and the country. Most of the garden images originate by directly scanning plant materials gathered from his garden, then magnifying and transforming them. The book is still our most highly evolved compression of storage medium. This finds its ultimate expression in a whole city which folds up into a book.